


The Clash

by rockykelboa



Category: Dragon Ball
Genre: 1970s, Alternate Universe - Human, Arson, Betrayal, Bombing, Civil Disobedience, Civil Unrest, Elections, F/M, False Identity, Minor Goku/Chi-Chi, Protests, Resistance, Revenge, Revolutionaries In Love, Riots, Secret Identity, Secret Relationship, Vandalism, Vegeta (Dragon Ball) vs Feelings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-01
Updated: 2020-10-15
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:34:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 45,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25619710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rockykelboa/pseuds/rockykelboa
Summary: Ten years ago, a foreign army commander, Frieza Cold, successfully overthrew Saiya’s monarchy and installed a faux federal government with himself as president. Ripe with corruption and violence, the general populace is left in a worse state than they’d been under the monarchy, and with the recent re-election of President Frieza, his rule appears indefinite. Now, Bulma Briefs and Prince Vegeta, the leaders of two rival revolutionary movements are plotting to be agents of change. Amid their schemes to recruit citizens to fight for their respective causes, they find themselves coming together in a way they least expected.Written for the 2020 Vegebulocracy Reverse Bang, with the original concept inspired by artwork from Rutbisbe.Beta read by Blackswans22
Relationships: Bulma Briefs & Vegeta, Bulma Briefs/Vegeta
Comments: 90
Kudos: 83
Collections: Vegebulocracy Reverse Bang 2020





	1. City Fodder

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rutbisbe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rutbisbe/gifts), [blackswans22](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackswans22/gifts).



The longer Frieza examined the latest installation above the fireplace, a portrait in his full military regalia cast in bronze, the more he despised it. The urchin sculptor had failed to bestow his image with the illustrious power and distinction his true stature possessed. This depiction appeared small, delicate, downright feminine. 

He was almost glad to be distracted from the awful display when the butler’s voice echoed at the back of the hall to announce the arrival of his ministers. A dozen pairs of boots scurried down the long pillared archway and lined up at his back. Frieza waited, watching the butler from the edge of his vision as he refilled his wine and withdrew. He tipped and twirled the glass, admiring the wine legs that trailed in syrupy currents, and his mouth watered as its peppery aroma wafted beneath his nose. Taking his time to savor the first few sips, Frieza left the men behind him to shift nervously between their feet. 

“We’ve subdued the threat, sir,” Zarbon finally summoned the courage to proclaim. 

“ _Subdued_ the _threat_ ,” Frieza repeated, slowly turning each word on his tongue, as if tasting the candied language his stooge chose to use with him like he was a common, plebeian fool. 

It seemed the nuance of what constituted a threat as opposed to a nuisance wasn’t worthy of differentiation. The Capsule Corps protesters, the bookish patriots that camped out on his lawn hollering bad poetry through a horn were a nuisance. And the Shadow Army, the fucking punks that planted pipe bombs inside his monument to blast it into flaming marble chunks were a threat, one which certainly hadn’t been subdued.

“Yes sir. Nine-hundred and forty-six dissidents have been taken into federal custody.”

“But…” Frieza prompted, caring little for the frosting the man should know better than to use to coat his failure. 

“But your monument, sir, it’s… unsalvageable. And we found this in the debris.” 

Frieza spun to see a shaggy-haired, mammoth soldier plodding to the foot of the dias with a marble boulder hugged in his arms. The soldier hefted the hunk around, grunting as he strained to extend it toward him to show where the smooth, finely-sculpted stone had been crudely graffitied with the scarlet crest of House Vegeta.

“It’s your…” Zarbon cleared his throat and drew in his voice to mumble at his chest, “…bottocks, sir.”

“I can fucking see that, you worthless twat!” His gaze fell on the mongoloid to direct with a wag of his finger, “Dispose of it.” 

It was a pleasant surprise to find the brute capable of reading between the lines as he bent at the knees, and with one laborious motion, shotput the rock at the cretinous councilmen. They scattered like roaches as it cracked apart against the tiles where they’d stood. 

“Zarbon, what is your job?”

“Prime Minister, sir,” he answered. 

“Which means…”

In a pathetic attempt to salvage what remained of his dignity, Zarbon straightened his coat and toed over the debris to stand before him. 

“It means I am in charge of overseeing the ministerial departments.” The scathing glare Frieza wore grew darker, and Zarbon quickly refined his answer. “It means I do whatever you ask of me, sir.”

“What is the one thing I ask of you?”

“To find Prince Vegeta.”

“To find Prince Vegeta…” Frieza nodded with a long sip of his wine and set the glass aside. “Are you good at your job?”

“No, sir.”

“What was that? Speak up!”

“No sir! I’m… Well, the issue is… The intel suggests… We don’t believe he’s alive, sir, or we would have located him by now.”

Rumors, ten years of searching amounted to more of them—rumors that the prince was harbored in an Acrosian bunker, or living lavishly in an overseas palace, or as a beggar right under their noses in the capital. And of course, the most aggravating one was that Prince Vegeta was dead and had been this entire time—a rumor Frieza invented himself the day he stormed the palace and found only the king and his youngest cowering in this very room. Claiming his victory required an extermination of the entire royal household, and had all of them been within his grasp, he’d have made a public spectacle of their culling. But the crowned prince having slipped through the cracks ruined those plans and necessitated the deception—a fact which his ministers all knew but seemed to forget.

For the first three years, the scavenger hunt to locate Prince Vegeta turned up dry. But then, truth’s whispers began to spread among the citizens that he was alive and building an army. The Ghost Prince, as they called him, became an urban legend, one that regardless of his status, alive or dead, emboldened a sect of punkish youth and old loyalists to raise his household’s banner through these little acts of rebellion. 

In the beginning it showed up in messages. The crest began to appear alongside kitchy little slogans: _God save the prince_ and _Long live Vegeta_ was spray painted in places nobody cared to look—alleyways and subway cars and burned out buildings. Before long, it was blasted everywhere, worn on the pavement of major thoroughfares, the windows of luxury highrises and the homes of politicians, on federal monuments and ministerial offices. Even FF soldiers woke-up in the front seats of their trucks to find the hoods defiled in red paint. 

An expensive annoyance, that’s what the rampant vandalism amounted to as Frieza was forced to create a special task force to whitewash every surface over and over and over again. But it did little to stifle the spread of the Ghost Prince’s following. What had been the Shadow Vandals became the Shadow Army—lowlife terrorists that graduated from paint cans to pipe bombs. Instead of rebel artwork, the imbecile FF who fell asleep on night watch were awoken by their own screams, trapped inside the fiery coffins of their trucks. 

Now, these anonymous militants were brazen enough to blow up his monument in the name of Prince Vegeta. Oh, he was alive, accumulating power, smirking from his bunker or whatever rat-infested hole he dwelled within.

“Zarbon...” Freiza beckoned the minister to approach with the point of his index, which the man did with the cautious fear in his eyes of someone who’d bore witness to Frieza’s brand of retribution on more than one occasion. Be they enemies or loyal, ineffectual idiots, the outcome was the same. The minister knew what was coming. 

Frieza plucked his wine from the table with a smile and traced his fingernail down the line of Zarbon’s quivering jaw. He took one last, long sip before he shattered the cup against the table’s edge. Then, sinking his nails into Zarbon’s chin, he wrenched his pathetic visage towards him and set the sharp glass stem beneath his eye. 

“For ten years, I’ve indulged your incompetence. I would say, I’ve been quite lenient. But my generosity is wearing thin. If you fail to deliver Prince Vegeta alive before the inauguration, you will find yourself meeting the same fate as the other Saiyan prince. Do you understand?”

“Yes sir, I understand.” A nervous gulp bobbed up the minister’s throat. He didn’t dare nod and risk puncturing his flawless skin against the glass. Once Frieza released his hold, the minister scampered backward, nearly tripping over the debris. He recovered his posture, but his voice still cracked with unease to ask, “What are your orders for Capsule Corps?”

Ah, yes… the fucking picket posse. Whatever patience he had with the so-called peaceful protesters and their leader Bulma Briefs had reached its limit. He was willing to let the little beggars believe they had his ear, that Saiya was a free and independent state, but he’d grown rather bored of them. What was the fun in ruling if he had to pretend to be interested in these ungrateful weaklings feelings? Give a beggar a bread crumb, and soon he’ll be demanding loaves. 

While antagonizing the protesters was a risky endeavor on the chance that they abandon their scruples and join forces with the prince’s army, it was one he could circumvent through a careful campaign of misinformation. The sheep were easy to frighten, and even easier to herd under his protection. They trusted a shepherd in a uniform over an unpredictable, insurgency of shadows.

His alliance with Tuffles—the weapons stockpiles they were building in that sand dune of a country, and their plans to invade Acrosia once this inauguration bullshit was over would be difficult to accomplish without the support of his petulant populace. The Federal Forces as they stood weren’t enough to both deploy across their northern border and repel a civil war from within, and the Tuffleian army couldn’t be completely trusted. If the citizens of Saiya weren’t going to support him voluntarily, he’d force their hands: an internal siege that would make them rue the day they betrayed the one who delivered them from the vermin of House Vegeta.

Of course, they’d be given the merciful opportunity of choice. Inauguration Day was just a month away, and there, he’d have the country’s attention and deliver his ultimatum.

“Let them sweat. As far as the public is concerned, the Capsule Corps and the Resistance are now one in the same. We keep their prisoners, and in a few days time, we institute a federal decree that their right to hold these little demonstrations has just been rescinded for the safety of the public.”

A wave of his hand dismissed his ministers to shuffle back down the long archway in a pathetic parade. One disappointment to the next, Frieza’s eye was caught again by the wretched sculpture. 

“One more thing,” Frieza called. “Get this hideous plate off my mantle and bury it along with its hack creator.”

* * *

Pearly strings of tears glinted in the lamplight as they traced down ChiChi’s cheeks and dripped from her chin. She tried in vain to dispel them, gulping and gasping, wiping at her eyes with the back of her shaking hands. 

Honestly, Bulma was surprised ChiChi hadn’t started crying sooner, but still, she felt a kind of hesitation in the hand she extended across the small table between them to drop on her friend’s quaking shoulder. In this state, it was likely the girl would gnash it off—as if a gesture of comfort meant the opposite, and ChiChi would find a way to be outraged that Bulma wasn’t sobbing too. 

Bulma wished she could. It might feel better than the odd, jittery suspension of any emotion at all. Maybe this is what shock felt like—a gallon of jet fuel burning through her core and no runway to take flight, just a constant, rumbling exhaustion. 

“A drink,” she said, and suddenly she was behind the deli counter sifting through its dusty cupboards and a sad stash of after-hours contraband, all her focus honed on a simple task: glasses, and corks, and the burn of cheap whiskey at the back of her throat. 

With puffy eyes, ChiChi stared through the glass Bulma handed her before she finally put it to her lips and winced. It really was shit, a poetic nightcap to pair with the unending hell that hijacked what was supposed to have been a day of hope.

A quiet rapping at the shop door sent both girls scuffing the chairs out from under them and charging toward the two recognizable, mismatched silhouettes that stood under the street lamps’ yellow glow. The moment Bulma unlocked the door, Krillin’s small, nimble frame smartly leaped around ChiChi, leaving Yamcha to absorb the oncoming crash. The girl’s momentary lapse of hysterics resumed, swinging her fists absently at his chest as she cried, “Where is he!?” 

Yamcha ignored her question of Goku’s whereabouts and steered ChiChi back to the little table, peeling her vice grip from his forearms as he sat her down.

“Be patient. It’s early. We don’t have names or hard numbers. That could take days. But we’re looking at roughly nine hundred arrests, as many injured, and at least twenty casualties and counting. Six of them are confirmed from the explosion, but the rest are courtesy of the FF. That’s just our sources, not theirs, obviously. State news says six. They’re saying we did it. They’re calling us terrorists!”

Bulma felt queasy as the news pooled in the pit of her stomach. The state media’s spin, lumping Capsule in with the Ghost Prince and his shadow army of militants, was too convenient to be surprising. It was the numbers that were hard to swallow, harder than bad whiskey. 

Gods, fuck. And it was perfect at the start; the largest march they’d held by far, tens of thousands of Saiya’s citizens walked the federal mall to the palace gates to demand an impartial recount of last week’s elections, where Frieza Cold claimed victory to a second term. Though the last ten years under his leadership weren’t exactly sanctioned, considering he elected himself as interim president of the Saiyan Federation he birthed after leading his foreign army across their borders to slay Saiya’s monarchs. 

A duplicitous ally, he came with a smile, an outstretched hand, and a load of promises and bullshit propaganda to rile half their citizens to his side. But he was a parasite, a tumorous extension of the Greater Icejin Nation that hoodwinked a disgruntled populace into turning against their own. 

Saiya’s late monarchy wasn’t perfect. It was flawed, severely, and had been since its inception. Half the wars they fought against their neighbors were a distraction invented by bored kings who were more entertained by chess games, using their citizens as pawns rather than caring for them. Poverty and a constant state of crisis were the status quo, and peace was always a promise they chased over a circular horizon. 

And then came Frieza. He saved them, perhaps necessarily, when the last king’s ambition, or maybe lack of it depending on whom one asked, drew the Tuffleian army nearly to the palace gates. Their Icejin allies didn’t just push them back, they made Tuffles bleed, but afterward, they lingered. Their presence was felt in the capital in equal measure as the royal family’s support decayed. 

Frieza was cunning. He watered a seed that was already planted within the populace. He branded the monarchy as ineffectual and weak and exploitative. He conned many of the citizens into believing a foreign invasion was an appealing alternative, that the death of the monarchy would usher in a free and fair system, that the people would have an equal voice, representation, and boundless opportunity not limited by inbred titles.

And now, here they were, the same paradigm as before, but worse. They were an extension of a foreign power. Their freedom was an illusion. That was clear even before last week’s sham of an election. 

If Frieza’s rhetoric managed to do one good thing, it raised the next generation to hold their heads up and believe that if they banded together, they could leverage change, demand the rights the Federation had promised them. That was Capsule’s mission—to behave as the government the country wanted and deserved. They weren’t going to slay kings and nobles and eight-year-old princes as Frieza did, nor detonate bombs in public acts of terror like the so-called Resistance. 

This was a setback. They could recover. Nobody was going to believe that Capsule had a hand in the explosion, and they’d had members arrested before, herself included on two occasions. They only had to wait for the facts to arrive, regroup, put out a statement. 

Krillin took a long pull from the bottle, and as if he could read Bulma’s mind, extended it toward her. With a generous swig, Bulma selfishly wondered how much alcohol it would take to blot out the persistent sobbing and begging of the girl beside her, a thought that instantly made her feel worse. 

“He’s gonna be fine, Chi. He was probably just arrested is all,” Krillin consoled with a pat on the back that nearly cost him his fingers when ChiChi snapped around in a hailstorm of sharp curses and slaps that sent him shuffling backward.

“Bulma...” Yamcha whispered and tipped his head for her to follow him out the shop’s back door, leaving poor Krillin to play counselor to ChiChi’s breakdown. 

It was unseasonably warm for November, and the air that hung heavy and damp from yesterday’s rain made the city feel more oppressive and dirtier than usual. Rats scampered through puddles wrestling and squealing over soggy scraps of food they’d ripped from the trash bags piled along the alley. As Bulma leaned against the brick structure watching them, Yamcha seized the bottle that was dangling precariously in her grip and swigged it back. 

Her voice sounded empty in her ears when she pointlessly filled the silence. “Long fucking day.” 

Yamcha nodded a tired confirmation. His normally bright, brown eyes were weary and dull, and his long hair was tangled, the underlayers beginning to mat behind his ears. 

She knew what news was coming before he cleared his throat to tell her, “I think I know where he is. People are saying they saw him fighting.” 

“Goddammit, Goku!” 

Being arrested would have been better news. At least that wouldn’t have been his choice. This was. And while Bulma knew he’d been unhappy, his growing discontentment with Capsule’s results, or lack thereof as he saw it, worn plainly on his sleeves, she didn’t think he would leave, not like this. Trading teams without a word, an explanation, the fucking courtesy to tell them he wasn’t dead felt like a betrayal, even for Goku. Her friend wasn’t insensitive and thoughtless on purpose; he was a good person at his core, but he was blind at the periphery, unable to see any perspective outside of his own. And he was impulsive. It didn’t take much to get Goku to jump. Of course, the Shadows would find him. 

“Dropping like flies,” Yamcha grumbled. 

“He’s a big fucking fly. Shit! But I still don’t understand why he wouldn’t have come back here. Pretend he’s not one of them, show us that he’s alive, at least for _her_ sake! That’s not like him.”

“I know. That’s the piece I’m still trying to figure out. Their runners are spread a little thin tonight, no surprise, but I can put something out there.”

“No,” Bulma responded before her half-formed thoughts had caught-up to her mouth. “I mean, yes, but it’s more than just Goku. How many do you think will turn after today? Everytime they provoke the Feds, we take the hit. They’re making us look weak!” It was unlikely that anything would come from the idea that struck in her mind, but trying was better than sitting on her hands and letting the Resistance take what it wanted. “Tell them I want to meet.”

“Meet? Why? Meet who? We don’t know who they are.” 

“I don’t know! They have a hierarchy, so someone at the top of the food chain that can speak for them.” 

It was a longshot, a fact that was clearly shown in the skeptical look on Yamcha’s face. He took one last drink before he handed her the bottle and sighed, “Alright, Bulma. I’ll see what I can do.”

* * *

Vegeta said nothing, but stared at Raditz in a homicidal sort of way as the idiot stumbled through an explanation as to why there was a large, unconscious man sprawled across the table, threatening to buckle its flimsy legs under his weight. 

“They clubbed him pretty hard, and he went down. But he was giving ‘em hell before then. If you’da seen him!” Raditz proclaimed. His eyes drew wide with reverence before he met Vegeta’s smoldering gaze and stopped himself from blathering too far off point. “Anyway, so I took the soldier out, and then uh…” 

Raditz scratched the back of his head and turned a pitiful, pleading look on Nappa, hoping he would come to his rescue. But the old man was too smart to admit he’d condoned this foolish plan. Clearly, he helped the moron transport the Capsule protester from the palace lawn into their basement, but he wasn’t about to throw himself under the bus for Raditz’s sake. The corners of Nappa’s lips turned on Raditz with a traitorous smile.

“Well, I didn’t know where else to bring him! If I’d left him there, who knows where they would’a taken him!”

“Who knows? Who cares! Shit, Drek, did you get clubbed in the fucking head too? This isn’t a shelter for Capsule refugees. Toss him out before he wakes up. Preferably downtown!”

“Hold on a sec! You don’t understand.” Raditz felt the desk behind him and tossed Vegeta a wallet so worn it nearly fell apart at the seams when he opened it and read the name embossed across the top of a Federal ID: GOKU SON.

“I’m supposed to know who this is?”

“No… It’s a fake. It’s… He’s my brother. It’s Kakarot.”

“How the hell would you know?” 

Aside from the goofy smile, Goku Son didn’t hold much of a resemblance to the bumbling idiot currently testing Vegeta’s patience. 

“‘Cause he looks just like our pops, and I’da recognized him anyway. You think you wouldn’t know Tarble if you’da seen him?”

Vegeta ground his teeth, suppressing a vague urge to jump across the table and tackle the tactless ass for mentioning his own, dead brother. But Raditz was right; had Tarble been around, even ten years older and a foot taller, he would have recognized him.

“He took out a dozen of FF before he went down. Nappa saw him. He’s one of us.” 

“Stop pissing on the rug, you fucking idiot!” Gods, after ten years of practice, it was impossible to housebreak the loose-lipped moron from using their real names. 

“We’re the only ones here! An’ I’m not lying! Parris saw. Tell him; he’s one of us!” 

They both looked to Nappa, whose small, affirmative shrug said it was a possibility. If this person really was as capable and willing of a fighter as Raditz suggested, he’d be an asset regardless. But if he was also the son of one of the Royal Army’s most effective special forces commanders, a loyalist that fought to death for his king and country, and Raditz’s brother—who despite his distractible, disorganized, and often dangerously incompetent nature was one of two people Vegeta completely trusted—this Capsule Kakarot could be someone worthy of rank. Gods knew they needed more qualified mid-level officers.

“Fine. Question him when he wakes up. Gauge his commitment. You know the drill,” Vegeta said, a directive aimed at his first lieutenant. He didn’t trust Raditz’s leaky sieve of a mouth to contain the confidential details of their operation, drunk on his little turn of fate, a dead brother sprung back to life to dull his judgement. The man looked ready to float smelling salts under Kakarot’s nostrils and recite his fucking diary. “ _You_ say nothing. Not until baby brother is cleared.”

When Raditz only dropped his chin with a pouty sigh, Nappa headed Vegeta off before he could dart around the table and tackle some sense into the dipshit. He ushered him away from Raditz and shoved him toward the mouth of the stairs. In the ten years they’d been together, the first half of which Nappa played guardian to two headstrong teens, one of whom outranked him—if there was anything the old man despised, it was playing interference to their quarrels. 

Vegeta went up the narrow staircase, where random drum kicks and choked-off power chords permeated from behind the heavy door as the band warmed up. The bar was packed with its usual clientele: the grimy underbelly of the capital’s youth, most of them members of the Resistance for no other reason than an excuse to satiate their crude, anarchistic appetites. Their skin in the game didn’t stretch so far as to care whether the Ghost Prince they fought for ever came to power, much less that he even existed. Any reason to stir a pot of chaos, they’d glady raise a black flag and storm into battle. 

Vegeta ducked under the bar top just in time to pop-up on the other side and catch Eighteen as she tossed a glass of liquor in the face of one such specimen: a slobbish regular with two missing molars who grinned perversely back at her, but knew better than to test the hellcat. She’d have him on the ground, castrated on a broken bottle before he could float a finger through her pretty blonde hair. 

The band kicked up with a swell of distorted guitars to drown out the drink orders that were shouted across the counter, forcing Vegeta to lean across its sticky surface and crane his head close enough to smell the stale cigarettes and whiskey on each patron’s breath. 

Ah... if dear daddy could see him now. The dipshit might have thought twice about instigating wars on two fronts he couldn’t win, or making matters worse by checking-out to mourn his broken heart and inviting Frieza across the border to finish his battles for him. Vegeta hoped the Icejin scum at least made the king watch when they put down Tarble, forced him to witness the consequences of his failure from the only source the man would have actually felt them.

Fuck, he needed to get drunk. Today was a win, strategically and personally, watching Frieza’s goddamned statue and the elaborate fountain around it blast apart. Arcs of fire, and water, and stone, and black smoke all shot toward the sky and rained down over the Federal Mall. The gratification he felt from the display should have lasted longer than it took for the elements to land. Lately it seemed nothing held his interest, much less motivated a vengeance ten years in the making. 

At the rate his army was siphoning weapons from under the noses of the Federal Forces, they’d be well armed for Inauguration. They only needed more soldiers to bear them. 

As a gift for their loathsome leader, his big day would be lit with fireworks, and end with a big red bow carved around his throat by Vegeta’s own hand. It was necessary, in the grand scheme. But more and more he wondered if the pinnacle act he’d been plotting and picturing for nearly half his life would be able to summon the desire to fulfill his destiny—to take back his birthright, his throne, his palace and his country—or if feelings of victory would dry-up on the floor with Frieza’s blood. 

Slowly, he made his way toward Eighteen in the middle of the long bar top, a trail of bottle caps dropping in his wake. Sidling up to her by the cash drawer, he unloaded the wad of beer-drenched bills clenched in his fist. 

“What was that about?” she asked, once he was close enough to hear her without shouting. 

“New recruit.” He eyed the two single shot glasses Eighteen set on the counter. “We’re gonna need more than that.”

“Well, I’d fucking hope so. That was the whole point of this.” 

“That too,” he said, swapping the shot glasses for tumblers. His gaze shamelessly floated to the girl’s tight, denim-clad ass as she climbed onto the counter beside him to grab a bottle from the upper shelf. 

They’d get their wish, he was certain. With how the FF jumped on the Capsule protesters, Raditz’s brother couldn’t have been the only one to cut the kumbaya bullshit and come back swinging. “Any news yet?”

Eighteen tipped her chin toward the muted television screen where the state media scrolled the expectant headlines below aerial footage of the smoking pile of rocks that used to be Frieza’s shrine: _Federal Forces break up violent Capsule Corps protest. Terrorist plot kills six in monument bombing._

“Still licking his scales, I’d guess. Won’t be long before the streets are swarming with FF,” she stated, celebrating in her stolid way as she handed him a glass and merely swirled her own around with a dull aspiration. “Here’s to hoping there’s a calm before the shit storm rains down.”

It was the bet they placed, that Frieza was level-headed enough not to take the detonation of _The Fall_ , a monument that until today stood as a symbol of his crowning achievement, so personally as to jettison the entire country into a police state overnight. If he’d plotted this long, a glacial subversion of freedoms that most of Saiya’s citizens only noticed as they added up in hindsight, he wasn’t likely to break as easily as the marble statue erected in his likeness.

“You have a message,” Eighteen said, plucking a folded heart from the pile of cash he’d set by the register. She unfolded the bill, smoothing it out before she angled it under the rope of black lights that ran under the bar rail. 

_UAB @ 8_  
hats only  
\- bb 

“BB?” Eighteen raised an eyebrow.

“Bulma Briefs.” 

The runners categorized their messages by bill and fold. Fivers were from Capsule, and hearts were friendly, or suspected to be. Though Vegeta doubted the group’s poster girl intended for her message to be delivered as a love note after today’s events. Her fingers were likely buried knuckle deep in her cerulean curls, tearing them out and cursing his name, his real one. 

“She wants to meet with _you_? In public?” Eighteen seemed almost piqued by the request, or maybe it was the Capsule leader’s inexpertly hidden message that irked her, having been duped by the blatant use of her initials. 

“So? What’s the problem? Tell her I’ll go.”

“Nic, you can’t be serious. You’re supposed to be a fucking scarf, at best. Send Parris.”

“A scarf, huh? Sounds kinky.” 

He flashed his eyes wide and grinned. But Eighteen didn’t indulge the comment with more than a chuff as she poured another drink for herself. It seemed they both were in a frosty mood that belied the day’s success. His own reasons were difficult enough to solve for x, and with her, any emotion that drifted up or down from net zero wasn’t worth entertaining. They were better off existing in separate bubbles until bar close, then a quick, angry fuck in the storage room before they parted ways. 

“Just tell her I’ll be there.” 

The goddamn Capsule woman was stubborn. It took a literal bomb to get her attention, and he wasn’t going to risk losing it now. Besides, Nappa had a job of his own to occupy him. 

Eighteen’s reservations weren’t misplaced, more than she even realized. She knew he was in charge, because she and her brother helped to found their little army. But with the Resistance at large, he played the part of mid-management everywhere but in that basement. 

The layers of his cover were hard for himself to keep up with at times. While only Nappa, his wife, and Raditz knew his real identity, Vegeta’s official ID for the past decade since the Federation existed said he was Nico Rex, and in a lot of ways, that person felt more familiar than Prince Vegeta ever was. Nic, who wore faded black denim with holes in the knees, dollar t-shirts and thrift store boots, and who shared a six-hundred-square foot uptown slum with three other people, who worked at a gritty dive bar, serving cheap beer to unsanitary anarchists, and who let Nappa’s wife bleach his hair and eyebrows every other goddamned week, that was him now. 

“Don’t look so worried. This is good. Trust me.” Bulma Briefs would get her meeting, just not with the Ghost Prince or even Nico Rex. He’d be somebody else.


	2. When Ya Get Drafted

Sounds broke into Goku’s consciousness as dull, heavy thuds, but his mind struggled to attach itself to their meaning. Nothing existed beyond the black of his vision and thumping beats. If it did exist, he was paralyzed, unable to recover it from whatever this place was where he was currently glued. He begged his eyes to open, but it felt much like running in a dream—no matter the effort, all his brain’s tugging and pulling at his lids, he couldn’t move them. 

Voices began to seep in, low whispers of a man and woman arguing. His focus homed on them, and the longer he listened, the more his mind slowly diffused the weighty fog of unconsciousness. As their voices drifted apart with the girl’s receding footsteps and a closing door, he sensed he was nearly alone. Again, he asked his lids to part and was relieved as the blackness lifted and a dim, yellow light hit his senses. Little by little, his mind awakened, and with it came a sharp pain that emanated at the back of his skull, gripping him all the way around, throbbing to the beat of his pulse. 

Pieces of his memory came back as sounds and fractured images, fuzzy at the edges. He recalled the sharp crack that lashed the air and dispersed with a rumble, as if a bolt of lightning had struck the crowd. Thousands of people that lined the mile stretch of the Federal Mall up to the palace gates erupted in a wave of howls, but as quickly as the confusion surged, it settled into an anxious lull. What eventually followed was unlike anything Goku had seen since The Fall.

The scenes flashed through his mind, and he shut his eyes again, hoping to erase them, to go back to the black space of whatever purgatory he’d just awoken from.

The man in the room cleared his throat with a phlegmy hack and his footsteps plodded closer. When Goku reopened his eyes, the colossal figure that appeared in his sightline was at least six and half feet tall with a muscular build that threatened to tear the seams of his dingy singlet as he raised an arm to run his palm across his hairless head. He squatted down to meet Goku with an unfriendly gaze.

“Where am I?”

The man’s thin mustache twitched above his lip as he curled it to tisk, “I go first.” 

His massive hand grabbed Goku by the elbow and pulled him upright on the creaking table, the motion of which sent a shock of pain to plummet from his brains to the pit of his stomach. With a few deep breaths, he quelled the urge to vomit. 

This was a club, he gathered, or the basement of one, now able to recognize the bump and grind above him as heavy music. 

The man scraped a chair across the cement floor and flipped it around. He straddled it, his thick arms folded over the backrest where he set his chin atop them.

“Goku Son, eighteen-years-old, five-foot-eleven, hundred and eighty-two pounds.”

“How do ya know my–”

“Your ID, dipshit,” the man said. He pulled Goku’s wallet from his back pocket and tossed it at his lap. “What I’m curious to know is how a tree-huggin’, song-singin’ little pacifist like yourself wound up cold-cocking a goddamn platoon of FF.”

“Am I in trouble?” 

As best he could, Goku tried to thread his thoughts together and understand the connection between the chaos of the FF’s attack and the strange, grimy space he now found himself being questioned as… a what… a prisoner? Had he been captured, and if so, by whom?

“Just answer the question. And don’t feed me some bullshit about self-defense.”

Goku opened his mouth to argue that it was self-defense, but the reflex to justify his actions with such a simplistic catch-all dried up on his tongue. It was much more than that. 

“Can only put up with so much. Ya know?” he dumbly stated.

The subtle bob of the man’s chin suggested he might. 

“So, you snapped, just like that?” he asked with a snap of his fingers for emphasis, but it seemed he wasn’t looking for a response so much as rephrasing Goku’s vague explanation, trying it on to see how it suited him. Whoever he was, he clearly wasn’t FF. But his interest in Goku felt sharp at the edges, as if the purpose of this strange interrogation was a test, one that was boobytrapped with the man’s own distrust. 

“Well,” he continued, “how’d it feel?”

“Feels like my head’s full’a sharp rocks.” 

The response didn’t appear to amuse the glowering figure. Goku knew what he was asking, but he wasn’t sure how he ought to feel about what he’d done. In the moment, he hadn’t been thinking, just acting on impulse. But now, when he woke, a deep-seated anger and vindication woke alongside him. The soldiers he’d met today deserved far worse than the blows he delivered. They came under a veil of smoke grenades to kick and club protesters to the ground, held them against the pavement beneath the soles of their boots, and yanked their arms back to zip tie their wrists so tightly that people were shouting in pain. They sprayed tear gas in the faces of young women and dragged them to their trucks by their hair. People on their knees, unarmed with their palms raised were butted unconscious by rifle stocks and carried off to meet the same fate. 

Replaying it all fanned the embers of his earlier rage, stirred the monster back to life to gnaw at him from the inside. He wrung his hands in his lap as if he could siphon the feeling through the tips of his fingers. He wasn’t a monster. But he wasn’t like the others either. He couldn’t lay down and take the abuse the FF unleashed on peaceful citizens as some kind of principle. The idea of those soldiers back in their bunks, sweating their sheets with guilt was about as realistic as Frieza waking up tomorrow to recount ballots. 

“I don’t feel bad, if that’s what you’re askin’. It felt right,” Goku finally said. 

When again, the man responded with a small, commiserating nod, Goku knew for certain this was a test, and so far, he’d been acing the questions.

“What’s your plan, Goku Son?” the man asked.

“What d’ya mean?”

“I mean, do you want to go back to playing patty-cake on the palace lawn, or you want to win?” 

“Win the recount?” 

The moment the ask fell from Goku’s lips, the demeanour of the man across from him shifted, as if the election in itself wasn’t just beside the point, but an affront. Through bared teeth and a spray of spit, he snarled, “I don’t give a fuck about a recount, son! I’m talking about winnin’ the war!”

Just as his heavy fist came down on the back of the chair, the basement door opened to swell the room with blast beats and distorted power chords. The noise felt like a fresh kick to the skull, and Goku tried to keep his focus from latching back onto the pain. 

“Close the goddamn door!” the man hollered. 

As the music was slammed back behind its partition and heavy feet galloped down the steps, Goku considered what the man just said: _win the war_. Nobody would call Saiya’s struggle with Frieza’s government warfare except the ones who called themselves an army. Suddenly, he became acutely aware of whose basement he was occupying. 

“You’re the Resistance?” 

A dark grin smirched across the man’s face, and he rolled his eyes toward the stairs as he said, “You’re about as dense as your brother.”

In the long seconds it took for the man’s comment to register, a voice Goku hadn’t heard in a decade wormed through his ears like a passcode springing open some closed capsule in his memory to unleash a ghost. 

“Hey Kat,” he said. 

Goku hesitated to turn around, because if he did, that meant he was dead too, and this bald, mustachioed neck-breaker ran the gates of Hell. As much as he loved Raditz, there was no way the renegade teen he’d known would have landed anywhere above ground. 

“Scared of ghosts, kid?” the bald man snickered.

The rustle of a plastic bag circled around him, swinging from his brother’s hand as he stepped into Goku’s frozen view. He looked the same as he did at sixteen, with the same long hair their parents bemoaned heaping over his shoulders. The only difference was the mass that now padded his once wiry frame. 

“It’s not anything like Ichido’s, but I’ll give the spicy miso a solid eight,” said Raditz, raising the bag of food.

“I’m… Am I… Are we… _dead?_ ” 

“An eternity with you two idiots. Shit, I hope not,” the bald man grinned. 

Raditz’s was smiling at him too, like he’d just escaped for a ten minute dinner run and there weren’t ten years between them, a decade where he left Goku alone and hoping at least for the first few that he’d return, then accepting for the rest that he was just as dead as their parents.

“But… How?… I don’t get…” Neither his mouth nor brain seemed capable of stringing together a coherent thought, at least not a nice one. If he hadn’t been rocked with a concussion, he’d have half a mind to serve Raditz his own. But right now, he could barely sit upright without feeling like his stomach was about to launch itself up his throat. 

“Where did you go?” he finally managed.

“I could ask you the same,” Raditz shrugged, and his stupid grin fell away as the bag dropped to swing between his legs. “Kat, I came back a dozen times. You weren’t there.”

This was his brother alright, instantly jumping to his own defense to absolve himself of any feeling that remotely threatened his agenda and made him responsible for anyone but himself. Of course Raditz was alive, had been this whole time, and never tried to find him beyond a few cursory swings into the deli. 

As if he could sense the brewing familial shitstorm, the bald man hoisted himself from the chair and yanked the takeout from Raditz’s hands. He ripped it open on the desk and rummaged for his meal. Raditz piped in with his own direction of whose was whose before the big man wandered up the rickety staircase with boxes in hand.

“What happened to you, Kat?” asked Raditz. The subtle disappointment in his brother's tone had no clear direction—disappointment in himself maybe, or a projection he lent Goku, or more simply the circumstances that displaced them. Raditz was a grifter, not easy to read.

“I hid in the cellar, waitin’ for her, and you too. I don’ know for how long, a week maybe, ’til it got quiet. They raided the place a bunch’a times.”

“Lolly bin?”

“Lolly bin.” Goku couldn’t help the upward tug of his lips as his brother recalled his favorite hiding place for their own games, a stockpile of lollipops and fruity hard candy their mother pretended was cleverly disguised as a vat of used vegetable oil, fully aware her sons knew it wasn’t but still said nothing. 

“I’m sorry, Kat. I assumed you were with her. Even then, I still came back every now an’ again to be sure. I even checked the fuckin’ lolly bin, hoping to gods you’d pop up with Twizzlers in your teeth.”

Coming from Raditz, the apology wasn’t half bad. It didn’t make up for the hell he’d put their family through, disappearing a dozen times with the criminal lowlifes he called friends, never bothering to check-in, not even in the midst of the Icejin army’s invasion or the ensuing purge. Though Goku wasn’t certain that his brother was telling the truth now—telling people what they needed to hear was a skill Raditz had perfected to the point that he was often convinced by his own lies. But that was the thing with family. Dysfunctional, broken, selfish as his brother was, he’d never be flawed enough to give-up completely.

“If you’d come back to the deli now, you’d find me.”

Raditz arched a brow. “It’s still there?”

“Me and my girlfriend run it.”

“ _You_ own mom’s deli?” he asked, a surprised smile fled across his face. 

“For a year now. The apartment, too. ChiChi’s pretty good with the business side, handles all the money and the orders and everything, and the cookin’ too, and I’m... Well, I guess I just do what she tells me to.” Goku was a little self conscious of the fact that he was basically a stock boy in his own shop, but his brother nodded like he was impressed. Not being particularly keen on hard work, Raditz absorbed it as a win. “So what about you? Where’ve you been?”

“Around…” Raditz’s gaze shifted sideways, looking about the space like the bald man had some peephole for eavesdropping, ensuring he didn’t blab anything vital. “Kat, I’m a part of somethin’ big now.”

“Shadow Army, I heard. For how long?”

“Can’t tell ya that.”

“Is _he_ really alive?” Goku wondered with his usual curious propensity. He wasn’t a loyalist per se, but there was something about the Ghost Prince’s existence that validated the Shadow Army, gave it a power Capsule Corps lacked. An invocation of Prince Vegeta’s name could raise the hackles of the FF while Bulma Briefs’s drew cat calls.

His brother kept up his teasing secrecy and shrugged, “Can’t say.”

Obviously, Raditz had a motive, a question of his own to ask. The big guy had all but given it away. But Goku’s brother was, as usual, incapable of being straight with him, choosing to wind around the point with his teeth exhibited by an irreverent smile.

“What d’you wanna say, Raditz?” he groaned, not bothering to mask his annoyance. 

His brother’s response sprung like a pinball on the heels of Goku’s question: “That I want you to be a part of it. Just say you’ll join, and then I can tell ya everything.” 

Dispirited as Goku had become with Capsule, the stories about the prince and his army were, at best, problematic. While the worst of them that were delivered through state propaganda were likely discardable, the same as the lies they spread about Capsule; there was plenty that was irrefutable. Evidence he’d seen himself in burned-out federal trucks and outposts with the scarlet threat of the prince’s insignia left behind like a sinister calling card. Fighting Frieza’s soldiers was one thing; burning them alive was something else entirely.

“Come on!” Raditz pleaded. “You think petitions and marches and camp-outs are ever gonna make a difference? How long’ve you been with them? What’ve you ever gotten out of beggin’ that cold-blooded sonofabitch? Even if he miraculously gave-in to your demands, it doesn’t fix what he’s already done. Maybe it’d be enough for your friends, but not for _you_. Whatever you wanna call us—the Vandals, the Shadows, the Resistance, the Fuck-All—we’re right, and you know it! If pops was here, you think he’d be holdin’ back?”

Raditz was right. Their father would fight Frieza to the death, again and again. It wouldn’t be out of some misplaced admiration for the royal family he served, but rather to save his own kin from a kind of evil that, not just at the time but still today, wasn’t widely understood except by those Frieza declared his mortal enemies. 

The Fall, as it was called, the day the Icejin army turned on the monarchs, invaded the capital and slayed the royal household, Frieza declared everyone that touched them—from the aristocracy to the army to the palace maids—enemies of his new nation. Thus began a hunt that ripped the city and its citizens apart. Nothing was sacred. 

Frieza’s campaign to slander the monarchy’s entire system of support was so successful that trusted neighbors turned over the families of low-level soldiers, handed them to the FF believing the sentence that awaited them was justified. All of them were branded as loyalists, a complacent part of a problem that was deeply embedded in the monarchy’s inequitable structure, and therefore deserving of their fate. Those that were shot on site were explained away as particularly aggressive and resistant to capture. But most were delivered to prison camps in Tuffles, which was arguably worse.

The level of Frieza’s brutality as it was dealt to the monarchical sphere of influence was forgotten by the majority of citizens. They weren’t the targets, and they got what they thought they wanted in supporting him... in words only. Nothing substantial from Frieza’s early propaganda ever arrived besides stability. There weren’t any more wars. And for many citizens, that was one hell of a currency. But for the son of a royal officer whose own family became victims of Frieza’s purge, who was forced to adopt a new identity at the age of eight—the same age as the youngest prince Frieza executed himself—peace wasn’t ever going to be enough. 

For the last five years, Goku had tried to live by Bulma’s rhetoric. He helped her start Capsule Corps, and her principles that were influenced by American civil rights’s champions spoke to a kind of world he wanted to live in. But the reality of Bulma’s utopia ever materializing, especially out of the narrow set of methods she was willing to use, was a pipe dream. They were never going to get what they wanted from the Federation through Capsule’s brand of activism because there was no negotiating with a person like Frieza Cold—a person that could murder a child prince by his own hand, gloat about it over the airwaves, and build himself a monument to celebrate.

“Fine, Rad. I’ll feel it out,” Goku conceded. 

“Yes?” Raditz was giddy; his face lit up with a new zeal as he hopped toward the desk and began to tear open the food containers, chattering over his shoulder. “This is gonna be good. You’ll see.” 

Maybe his brother was right. Maybe the Shadow Army could provide the kind of active measures Capsule wouldn’t, and it was destiny that reunited them. After years living in the same city, each believing the other was long gone, just when Goku found himself at wits end with the organization, his brother sprung back from the dead with an alternative. That kind of timing couldn’t possibly be coincidental. 

But when his brother turned back to shove a box of fried rice into Goku’s hands, his face had twisted with a look that was almost wicked as he added, “There’s just the matter of your initiation.”

“Initiation?” Goku’s own smile faltered remembering that in everything to do with Raditz, there was a good chance it’d be a big mistake.

***

Goku arrived back at the deli in that dark, unsettling hour before dawn, after the city’s most sordid characters had found refuge, but the early shift-workers had yet to slough off for the trains. The empty block where he stood fighting with the front door’s janky locks felt post-apocalyptic, like he was the last man on Earth. 

He briefly considered sleeping on the floor behind the deli counter. Between the riot, a concussion, and surprise reunion with his sibling, he felt exhausted, beyond the point of trying to wade through the muck of his thoughts. And ChiChi, even if he managed not to wake her now, would shake him in an hour when she discovered him beside her. 

Gods, he was glad she hadn’t come to yesterday’s protest. She wanted to, begged to, even tried to pull favors with Krillin to watch the store and care for her father so she could. The guilt he felt not just twenty-four hours ago when he descended the stairs of their flat for the march without her had inverted, and he fisted his shirt at his chest as he climbed them now, trying to breathe through the odd surge of anxiety that felt as if it could collapse his lungs just imagining what he’d have done had ChiChi been with him and accosted by the FF in the ways he’d seen. 

He attempted to be quiet, knowing she was sleeping on the other side of the door, opening it a fraction to be sure before he crept inside. He didn’t need the lights. He knew the layout of the apartment like the back of his hand. Not much had changed since he lived there as a child, except instead of his parents, ChiChi’s father occupied the bedroom, and instead of his brother, he and ChiChi inhabited the main living space off the kitchen. 

She was asleep in the bed they shared, her body snuggled-up inside her pillow fort. It was a thing with her. She was like a cat kneading out her space. Every night she packed the narrow gap where the mattress didn’t quite meet the wall with pillows and slept wedged up against it with more pillows hugged against her chest and clamped between her knees. There was some security, she explained, in having fluffy braces propped around her.

Goku tip-toed toward the kitchen, avoiding the squeaky spots as he crossed the floor. Maybe snacks were his pillow fort, because he wasn’t hungry, just looking for something, anything to lull him, cut the odd anxiety to a manageable enough level to sleep. But the creak of the fridge door as he opened it was accompanied by a piercing shriek. He snapped it shut to see the whites of Bulma’s eyes jumping out at him in the dark. Coffee grounds trailed from the bag behind her like a running faucet. 

“Goku! What the hell! You scared the shit out of me!” she cried at a volume that still failed to identify him, as if she was shouting at deaf home invader. 

“What are you doin’ here?” he whispered, hoping she would take the hint, but she’d spun from fright to anger on a dime, a reaction he should have expected. Bulma didn’t have a gear for subtlety. He might as well have turned on all the lights, because her switch was wired to the same fusebox. On or off, she was either unconscious or she was spitting voltage—good and bright and passionate when things were going her way, and bone chillingly terrifying when they weren’t. Today was one that he would pay to be outside of a mile radius from Bulma Briefs. 

“What am _I_ doing?” she hissed through her teeth that were as glaring in the dim light as her big eyes. “I’m consoling _your_ girlfriend, you insensitive ass! Where the fuck have you been?”

Goku stuttered to respond. While hiding his secret encounter with his brother and the Resistance from ChiChi was enough to give his conscience a stroke, Bulma was a beast with sharper fangs and a thicker hide who’d known him for nearly a decade and could make his scalp itchy with sweat whenever he was less than truthful.

She sensed his waning support for Capsule before he’d realized it himself. And she was on him like a bloodhound, sniffing out his head over drinks in the deli after hours, taking advantage of his trust and their friendship more and more, using it as some litmus test to prove his loyalty to her cause. Liquor was one hell of an elixir, because while he let down his guard to be honest, her capacity to be reasonable dropped in equal measure. 

Wanting to leave the Capsule Corps wasn’t personal, but he feared that Bulma wouldn’t be able to separate the decision from this thing they created together. At the time, he was too young to fully understand what her ideology meant giving up, especially the way it played out in practice. And now, realizing he’d outgrown the movement, her lack of support was possibly the biggest disappointment, because she was the only one who figured out who he really was. He would never expect her to agree with him, but at the very least, when the time came to tell her he was stepping back from the group, he hoped she’d understand.

In his current state of mind, Bulma was the last person he was prepared to lie to about his whereabouts. But it seemed he’d be spared momentarily from answering her, hearing ChiChi squealing his name and her feet scampering across the hardwoods. Not that he was thrilled by the idea of being interrogated by the two of them, but ChiChi’s presence would at least defer whatever suspicious line of questioning Bulma had in store.

As ChiChi barreled around the corner into the kitchen, her stocking-clad feet nearly slipped out from beneath her, and she launched herself at Goku in part to break her fall. Her arms cinched around him like a tourniquet to cut the flow of heavy thoughts that swelled inside his head. 

“Can you imagine how worried I’ve been, you idiot?” she wailed, her breath falling warm against his chest. She stepped back to examine him at arm's length, pupils skittering back and forth like some speed reading competition. “Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine. Got a little too close to the action, I guess. Bonk on the head knocked me out, but I’m okay. Some good sumerians pulled me outta there an’ fixed me up. Good as new, see?” 

“Good samaritans?” quipped Bulma. The way she folded her arms and arched her brows, it was hard to tell if she was correcting his grammar or questioning his story.

“Yeah, they even bought me dinner,” he grinned. 

He fought to keep the corners of his lips from hardening like a plastic mask. It wasn’t his brother that made him nervous; it was what he promised to do for Raditz that set his pores to crank their valves and steep his forehead in sweat. The job he was to report for in two days, he didn’t know enough about to have feelings, but his other task, delivering a roster of Capsule influencers that he was confident might trade teams felt like sabotage. It wouldn’t end at a simple hand exchange of a list of possible recruits; the Shadow Army would certainly cast him as their pitchman.

The Resistance aside, he wasn’t lying. Technically, Raditz and the scary bald man were whatever word it was she’d said. They rescued him from the heave-hoe of FF soldiers tossing him into the back of a truck and waking up hours later on the floor of a federal holding cell. 

Bulma’s head cocked sideways, and her tone held a mock sincerity that was reminiscent of his mother teasing out a lie. “Well, did you get their names? We can thank them in the next newsletter.”

“Great idea!” chimed ChiChi. 

“Well uh... ya see, I don’t remember their names on account of the concussion. One of ‘em was bald and the other one had hair.”

Both girls expressions twisted with the kind of pathetic look he was used to receiving whenever he said something that was woefully unhelpful. This time it worked in his favor. 

“Maybe some sleep will jog your memory,” Bulma scoffed through an eye roll, abandoning the exchange to half-heartedly brush the coffee grounds she’d spilled into her palm and dispose of them in the sink. “I’ll be downstairs, covering your shift. If you think your head will be up to the task of selling toilet paper and potato chips tonight, I need you to cover mine. I have a date.”

“A date? Like with a man?” ChiChi asked.

“Mmm, I wish. Unfortunately, it’s more of a business date with the shadow fuckers.”

“Who?” blurted Goku, unable to contain his surprise.

“Dunno. Don’t care, honestly, just so long as the sadistic thugs get the message that we are not going to sit back and take the fall for their collateral damage. You probably missed the news, Goku, but that stunt they pulled today killed six civilians. That was the explosion we heard, and that’s what set-off the FF to attack and kill our own. Twenty, we think. They arrested nearly a thousand.”

“Feds could be lyin’,” he pointed out.

That idea was much easier to swallow and just as possible, because according to state news, the only news that was broadcast to the public anymore, every mistake the FF made in terms of collateral damage, they lauded over the airwaves as an act of terrorism by the Ghost Prince. How was Bulma so sure that the boom they heard before the troops stormed on the marchers wasn’t ignited by the FF themselves?

“It’s a possibility, but that’s the point, isn’t it? If it wasn’t the Resistance, and we’re both being swept up in some FF ploy to turn the public against us, then all the more reason to communicate, don’t you think?”

He was too shocked by the question to answer with more than a nod. While it was unlikely Bulma was suggesting the organizations meet in the middle and work together to rid themselves of a common enemy, the fact that she was capable of setting aside her contempt for them to initiate a rendezvous was a promising start. 

“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” said ChiChi. “They’re dangerous. What if they tried to pull something? We don’t know who any of them are!”

“It’s fine, ChiChi. They don’t have a reason to hurt me. Besides, we’re meeting in public.”

“At least take Goku with you!”

It wasn’t a bad idea. But while a conversation between Bulma and the Resistance was one he’d be curious to hear, his friend wasn’t the type to tolerate the insinuation that by virtue of her gender she required protection. Bulma groaned dramatically and stomped passed them for the front door. 

“I’m gonna say ‘I told you so’ now before we start receiving packages with your fingers in them!” ChiChi shouted at her back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I promise the next chapter is 10 thousand words of Vegebul!  
> Maybe I should have mentioned in the summary, but the story takes place in late 1978, so the punk revival is in its prime. Vegeta is kind of hiding in that scene, and all the chapters get their names from songs from that era.


	3. Platinum Blonde

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is only the first half of a very long chapter. I will try to post the 2nd half early next week! I just wanted to get a Vegebul scene out before the weekend. 
> 
> Thank you so much for the kudos and comments! I appreciate them so much! Things have been a little crazy lately with a newborn plus moving into a new house, but I promise I will go back and respond. xoxox
> 
> A thousand thanks to Rutbisbe for creating [this amazing bonus piece to go with this scene!](https://twitter.com/rutisfree/status/1289493036540411904?s=20)

Evidence of a bad habit had collected at the side of the console. Bulma placed the glass remains of her latest beer beside her five other kills and scanned the arcade with a scowl. The only person to approach her all night had been the waitress, which meant the entire evening had been a frivolous waste of time because all she’d managed to do was catch a buzz and a not-too-shabby score on a game called Dragon Ball. 

Being cautiously optimistic was apparently an overreach when it came to dealing with the Shadow Army. Of course, they weren’t going to show. She doubted it had much to do with the FF’s increased presence on the Westside’s streets where ninety-percent of Capsule’s supporters resided. The Shadows had nothing to fear. They were anonymous; no signs or insignias could distinguish them from any other citizen. And unlike herself, they didn’t shout their political affiliation from the mouth of a megaphone. Perhaps _she_ was the risk they weren’t willing to take. Gods knew the FF had double the eyes on her since yesterday’s protest; she felt them crawling on her skin like fucking bed bugs when she walked to the arcade.

She’d need to reach Yamcha to send another message, or maybe follow the Resistance’s chain of runners to the source. Though despite Yamcha’s long history as a real life Aladdin, expert in the art of sneaking and stealing and spying, she doubted even he would be able to track the elusive little brats who ran their errands. But it was worth asking. Hopefully he was home and had drinks and a mood to help her salvage the useless evening.

Bulma was gazing blurry-eyed at the label of her beer when a fresh one was roughly set next to the others, rattling the empties and her attention to the man who delivered it. He looked very young, as much as her, severely attractive but a bit ill-natured in the way his fine-cut features fixed on her with a devious sneer. She gathered this wasn’t a pick-up. So maybe… 

“You’re late,” she told him, a comment that didn’t appear to register. If it had, he didn’t acknowledge it. Instead his scathing focus homed on the game behind her, and as he stepped toward the console, he forcibly shouldered her out of the way. 

“You about done here? You’ve been bogarting the game for an hour, at least.”

Bulma squinted between the beer that was clearly purchased for her and the peckish blonde who was now pretending she didn’t exist, feeding the machine a token. _Say something. Make it clever._ But what? She was utterly baffled as to what this interaction was, much less how to respond to it. His dark eyes were tunneled on the screen, jaw clenched, left hand playing the push-buttons with the dexterity of a concert pianist, separate from the right that rammed the joystick like he meant to murder the transmission. It was seeming less likely that he was the Resistance member she’d been waiting for, and more like he was a random fuckboy, some domineering asshole who thought this act would get him laid. She could put him on the spot, call out his pathetic routine that probably only worked on psychological trainwrecks with daddy issues, or… 

“Tch… Waste of your super gauge,” Bulma tapped her finger against the screen. 

The blonde swatted at her hand like a fly and grunted. Honestly, she had no clue what she was saying, just stringing together jargon she’d picked up the few times she’d been here and the two fucking hours she stood in front of this very machine waiting for some Shadow Army sergeant to give her the time of day. 

“Tap out!” She shouted and punched a few random buttons out from beneath his fingers. 

“The fuck, woman?!” His eyes widened, and the firm line of his lips slipped at the corners in the faintest hint of a smile. Oh, this was definitely a pick-up, just an embarrassingly amateur one. He lacked the commitment to play the brooding dickhead, and the humility for any other role. But it was fun to watch him flounder, unable to regain his focus, cursing and whacking his palm against the buttons when he lost the match. 

“You kinda suck.” 

“You threw salt in my game. And I don’t suck. I have the top score.” He pointed to the ranking players' initials that flashed over the screen. 

“You’re TBL?”

“If that’s what it says.”

“Does it help?” she asked. Her face fixed with a solemn look, and she did far better than him to uphold it, even as he scrunched his nose as if a rotten smell had fouled the air. 

“Help what?”

“To cure whatever it is you’re compensating for.” Bulma blatantly dropped her gaze to his crotch and said, “Tiny Dragon Balls?”

Ah, this was fun. The past twenty-four hours’ emotional upheaval still hadn’t quite settled enough to thoughtfully detangle from her head and unpack into something meaningful for herself much less the people that depended on her leadership. By now, she’d hoped to be home, frantically pacing a trench into the floor of her room, spinning a plan out of bad whiskey and too many cigarettes that could propel the Capsule movement out of the miserable hole they’d been shot into. But so far, there was nothing to work with. Both the Federation and the Resistance were conspicuously quiet as if in a standoff, each waiting for the other to chuck a bomb into the water to make a wave. All things considered, messing with a cocky playboy’s head was a high point, albeit a pathetic and selfish one. 

Despite the colorful dig, the guy still looked rather full of himself. Chin lifted, he swept a hand at the machine. “Go for it princess if you think you can do better.”

“Absolutely. Another round on you if I win.” 

Bulma fed the game a token and wiggled her fingers, grinning at him as the system loaded. While most of her skill was a lucky, frenzied press of random buttons and dodged attacks, she’d beaten his last score a dozen times.

With the same three fighters she’d been using all night, Bulma dug in. Maybe she’d hit her sweet spot of drunkenness, buzzed enough to unbend her mind, but not so much to impede her coordination. Or maybe she just performed better under pressure with an attractive opponent as her audience, chuffing at her side as she bagged the first round. 

The second went as quick as the first, with every neuron in her head firing at peak performance, and the third started off with the same strong break from the gates. But the computer managed to axe her best fighter before she’d taken out any of its players, making recovery an uphill battle. The few combinations of moves she’d learned, basic as they were, she managed to make the most of when paired with swift defense. One such dodge rewarded her with an opening to unleash a super move and KO the computer’s remaining player. 

Bulma whooped with her arms raised toward the ceiling in her own standing ovation. When she hopped around to rub it in, she caught the boy off-guard. He appeared to have been rooting for her, not overtly, but enough to witness the conscious displacement of intrigue as his lips turned and brows dropped to force a weighty scowl. God, he was terrible at pretending to be hot and bothered… Or rather just bothered. 

“I’ll take that drink now,” she said, wagging her empty bottle a few inches from his pitiful mask of a pout. “Something stronger, and decent too.”

She couldn’t help examining him as he walked to the bar. He was dressed like a punk, black from neck to toe in a leather biker jacket and boots he only bothered to lace-up halfway. She didn’t hate the look. His slim cut jeans really drew a focal point to his best asset. Blondes weren’t really her thing, but she doubted he was a natural. He didn’t have the complexion for it. His eyes were dark as charcoal, and his hair was too blonde, almost platinum, which meant he bleached it or lost a battle with a bolt of lightning. It wasn’t a deal-breaker. 

Good god, she was really thinking about getting laid right now by a random, douchey stranger? The answer was yes, a resounding, stadium-filling hell yes. A mindless fuck to distract her from the current plague of responsibility, playing point-guard for the entire Capsule movement that was barely treading water. 

Watching the boy strut back over, drinks in hand, she felt almost willfully trapped, as if the voices of instinct and good sense had been sedated by too much stress and beer and a bored libido in rebellion. There was something mysterious circuiting beneath his arrogance, a live wire sparking and crackling in an unpredictable current—one of those handsome serial killers who seduced his victims through intense eye contact, pinning them between a sharp pair of cheekbones and thick, broody brows. 

She didn’t even know his name. That was better though, right? No name meant no commitment, no inhibition, and no remorse. 

“You got a name?” Bulma asked. 

Goddamnit! She needed one, at least to jot on the back of a receipt in her pocket as a lead in case she turned up dead, or to scream from beneath him if she turned out very much the opposite. 

The hand he extended toward her with a generous pour of clear booze—hopefully better than the horse snot she’d been choking down—paused midway between them. His expression became oddly fixed by apprehension, as if she’d asked him about his hopes and dreams and greatest fears. It felt like a red flag. Serial killers wouldn’t be forthcoming about their names. Obviously, they didn’t have business cards, but he had initials. 

“TBL… Tiny Balled Loser?” Bulma smirked as she took a professional-grade sip of her drink, a decision that instantly backfired like slurping rubbing alcohol. She erupted in a fit of coughs. “Oh fuck, that is not what I was expecting!”

“It’s tequila.”

“No shit. Who drinks tequila on the rocks? Are you trying to get me drunk?”

“You’re already drunk. I’m just trying to play the game.” 

The boy stepped past her and dropped another token into the machine without so much as a glance, as if his interest in her was suddenly lost. Or maybe it didn’t exist in the first place and this was all an embarrassing assumption concocted by a liquid dinner and desperate appetite for distraction. She might as well have flashed the asshole, gotten a solid rejection before she wandered over to Yamcha’s for a condescending earful over a mission he knew would fail and an inevitable hook-up she’d feel terrible about in the morning. 

“You’re up first, princess,” said the blonde, turning back to her with a sly smile. 

Bulma didn’t know whether she wanted to smack it from his mouth or shove her tongue between his pretty teeth. 

“Don’t steal my strategy,” she sneered.

“Fumbling chaos? I couldn’t if I wanted to.”

Bulma ignored his smart remarks that continued to rumble behind her as she played, not as well as the previous game, but well enough not to completely embarrass herself.

When it was his turn, he quickly took out every fighter in the first round without losing any of his. And the second was almost as fast with only one of his team KO’d. Maybe he wasn’t lying about having the high score. As the last round began, she remembered they’d wagered drinks, which was hardly fair, a beginner going up against a veteran. He didn’t seem like a humble winner either. He’d be all smug about it, gloat like some pro ballplayer taunting a t-baller. Naw, she couldn’t let him win. 

Bulma took an ice cube into her mouth and spat it at his cheek. The boy growled but he didn’t lose focus like the last time. If anything he dug in harder, braced against the machine with his feet separated, a slight bend in a knee. Gods, he was taking this way too seriously. As Bulma tipped back the last sip of her drink and shook the cup of ice, she realized he was right about her inebriation, because she had zero inhibition to stop herself from swiftly yanking the collar of his shirt and jacket to dump it down his back. 

“Fuck!” he yelped. His low, gravelly voice pitched hilariously toward a tenor as he abandoned the game completely and shot around, hopping on the balls of his feet to shake the cubes from his t-shirt. The look on his face was murderous. For a second, Bulma worried she’d gone too far and he was angry enough to cuss her out in the middle of the bar to make her feel drunk and dumb, which she was fully aware of the fact that she was both. But his mask slipped like before, and he was almost smiling as he snatched her wrist to jerk her toward him. He swiped his own glass off the console’s ledge and dumped its remaining ice over her head. As the cubes scattered at Bulma’s feet, he shoved the empty glass into her chest and sneered, “I’ll take a refill.”

Bulma held his gaze for several seconds until the tense shift of a few nearby patrons pulled her shocked expression from the man before her to smile at them. She wasn’t some damsel needing rescue. That they thought as much was more a commentary on his punk-ass aura, because she wasn’t some fucking doormat. 

“Fine. But since you think you’re such a pro, I get a handicap next round. Double match points.”

The blonde shrugged as if the challenge was a laughable one he would happily indulge. Bulma flagged down the waitress for two more drinks as he started another game, probably trying to fit as many rounds in as he could while she was distracted and couldn’t sabotage him. 

Bulma looked around the room as she waited for the server to return, taking in the sounds of chiptunes and cheery conversations. From inside the arcade, it seemed like yesterday’s attack on the palace lawn didn’t happen, and it was just another Friday night. That was how it went. She didn’t take people’s complacency personally. It was human nature to wait until the eleventh hour, when they were looking down dire straits, before they found the motivation to act. Frieza’s artful deployment of misinformation had never helped her to convince them.

In a way, she was jealous, because right now her conscience felt like a cinder block on her chest, making it hard to breathe. She was fucking drunk, and about to get drunker, consiously pursuing a pretty face at a bar while four-figures of Capsule members were either jailed or overwhelming the few free clinics she’d persuaded the Federation to sponsor with injuries inflicted by its own soldiers. 

Less than two days stood between now and the Capsule community meeting, and she’d have nothing to report. Maybe that was Frieza’s plan. His silence left them without a foothold to move forward, and any retaliation would only make him appear like the victim and turn the public against their movement, making the state media’s lies about them being responsible for the bombing more believable. 

“Are you forfeiting?” The man’s voice shook her attention to the console where he waited, sipping a drink she hadn’t noticed the waitress had already delivered. “Your odds aren’t looking good.”

Story of her life, and she hadn’t quit yet. Bulma glanced at his match score that still flashed on the screen. It seemed that he wasn’t lying about his skills when allowed to play without interference. Beating him even with their agreed upon handicap wasn’t going to be easy, but she wasn’t going to quit and give him the satisfaction.

With her chin lifted, Bulma shoved him away from the console. She ignored his little chastising comments about choosing the same fighters. Relying on her best was a smart strategy. And she liked the characters, imagining that they were the good guys. While Piccolo’s super move took way too long to build his ki gauge to deploy, he was a heavy hitter, and she’d gotten the hang of his special moves enough to be deadly. But in the first round, the computer’s fighter Cell was leeching him hard, so she swapped him for Gohan. But even that was difficult, and she just barely managed to KO her opponent with his powerful Kamehameha attack. 

The computer dropped the white and purple lizard next, Freezer, whose name, high, grating voice, and pale complexion were so reminiscent of their fearless leader, she wondered if the design was on purpose. He wasn’t nearly as difficult as Cell, especially against her favorite character in the game. So she tagged-out Gohan for the lavender-haired, sword wielding warrior Trunks. Right from the start, she had the upper hand. Trunks was fast with his physical attacks, and she could hack away at Freezer’s energy as quickly as she dodged his attacks. 

She’d just about worn the lizard down when her attention snagged on the man that was standing so close to her that when he spoke, she felt his voice vibrate against the thin membrane of air between them. She didn’t even hear what he’d said, just felt it brush down the line of her neck, lifting every hair like static. 

“Shit!” Bulma cursed as Trunks took a vicious hit. “Back off buddy. You’re in my space!”

The boy laughed, and another wave chills nearly rolled her head off its axis. Fuck, he was doing this on purpose. _Just ignore him. Concentrate._ Bulma grit her teeth to focus and keep Trunks off the ropes as Freezer came at him, chaining attacks that quickly struck down her health. It was impossible to block him. 

When her real-life opponent reached around her to set his glass on the ledge at the side of the console, even without touching her, he practically had her pinned. The heat of his body at her back felt magnetic, pulling her blood to the surface. Her face burned; the collar of her shirt felt choking, and she needed to get her goddamned jacket off before she passed out. At least he was well in range of catching her if she did. 

Freezer KO’d Trunks, and Gohan was thrown back into rotation, but Bulma lost all motivation to finish the game. She turned to face the man with a gulp, expecting to find him gloating, some clever comment ready on his tongue. Instead, he just stared at her with an intensity set in his eyes like he could cast a spell through them and compel her to make the first move. Too bad for him, she was far better at psychological warfare than Dragon Ball.

Bulma cleared her throat, “I’m gonna step out for a smoke. I need some air.”

“Sounds counter-productive.” 

“Ha. Sounds like you should find a better source for PSAs than your passive-aggressive daddy,” she said, then ducked under his arm with a narrow-eyed smirk, daring him to forfeit, to say goodnight and move on to easier prey, perhaps the kind he could pay to fluff his ego. Though taking shortcuts and hacking into the winners circle on arcade games, much less women, she suspected was beneath him. Whatever end goal their interaction shared, he didn’t just start it, he seemed thoroughly entertained. Like some enterprising narcissist, the challenge in and of itself was probably prerequisite to getting off. He wasn’t about to admit defeat and let her walk away without him. 

“Hold on, woman,” he called on cue with just a few measly paces of beer stained carpet between them. Amature. Bulma pivoted back to feign impatience while he chugged her untouched drink without even a wince.


	4. What's My Name

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I tried to split this chapter with the last one, but it still somehow managed to creep over 8k. On the bright side, if we're rolling with a theme and the last chapter was a few beers and a shot of tequila to get the night started, then this one is a long island ice tea with a lemon wedge. I tried! Smut is the most difficult thing for me to write. I much prefer knocking out a dozen depictions of a panic attack with my other active story. That's probably a conversation for my therapist. Anywhoo... Hope it's ok!
> 
> There's probably a few typos, since I changed 30% of this one after Blackswans22 beta read it. If you see one, DM me! <3

The autumn air that had blown in from the north to displace yesterday’s stagnant fog was almost sobering; it cut her buzz to something manageable. Bulma zipped up her sweatshirt as she scanned the long block. There were more FF on the corners than there were citizens, not that she expected them to wander near the bar. The privates on sidewalk patrol weren’t the nation’s most ambitious soldiers, especially this time of night, and rarely moved off their posts to drag their asses up and down the streets. More often than not, they sat in their trucks eating take-out and only took to bullying when boredom intersected a second wind. 

As she lit a smoke, her new companion walked over to a BSA Lightning parked on the curb. He propped himself halfway on the seat and pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket.

“Why am I not surprised?” she teased.

“Seems my passive-aggressive daddy was a failure.”

“No, not that. I could smell them on you.” Bulma nodded toward the bike. “I had one like that, briefly. A Bonnie though.”

“Now _that’s_ surprising."

“ _Tch._ Why? ‘Cause I’m a girl?”

He was smart not to answer and cupped a hand over the tip of his cigarette; then, pulling a hip flask from his other pocket, he took a swig and offered it toward her. Bulma waved the drink away, unwilling to cede the modicum of control she’d regained from the cool air.

“What did you do with it?” he asked.

“Sold it. Primary transmission problems, gearbox problems, rust problems. Couldn’t afford the expense, and a girl can’t eat metal.”

“Ian Fleming might disagree.”

“Jaws? He had steel teeth. He didn’t eat it.”

“Way to spoil an interesting henchman, Bitchy Dreamsnatcher.”

“My bond girl alias?”

“Naturally.” He gave a smug little smile then extracted his keys from his pocket, wagging them in sync with the beat of his eyebrows. “Wanna drive it?”

“Safe. How drunk are _you_ Dick Deathwish?”

“Drunk enough to let you.”

Bulma held out her palm, gesturing for the keys and was surprised that he tossed them to her. Gods, he _was_ drunk. Nothing in his body language suggested it, except the hard edge of conversation had blunted to become borderline friendly. She pocketed his keys, enjoying the pout that fled over his face as he realized that she meant to keep them.

“You’re not serious. How am I supposed to get home?” he whined.

“You have legs.”

“I live uptown!”

“Then train.”

“ _Tch_. You’re about as fun as I thought you’d be,” he scoffed under his breath, smearing the words together like an insult he wanted her to feel but not hear, exactly.

It was probably paranoia, but Bulma didn’t want to think about the possibility that he recognized her and this was some callow conquest to see if he could lure the face of the Capsule movement to sleep with him, cut a brag-worthy notch out of his bedpost to impress the gutter punks he rolled with.

“Did the personality assessment come free with the beer or did you–” Bulma’s intention to prod him was abruptly cut down by a clamor of voices that rose at the end of the block. They both turned to witness a pair of FF guards harassing a trio of young men who’d crossed the street. 

With the tips of their rifles, the soldiers bullied them to spill their pockets onto the sidewalk and stand face first, flat against the building with their arms overhead while they pilfered their belongings. They were uniformed thugs who got away with behaving like criminals because they were the law, and citizen complaints were probably filed directly into a paper shredder the FF had labeled with a gross, racial slur. If the men stood up for themselves, being robbed would be the least of their problems. They’d be beaten within an inch of their lives then thrown into the fed box for the weekend when their only crime was not being Icejin in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Bulma’s inclination to loiter and watch the encounter was perhaps unwise. As if sensing the couple’s observation, one of the soldiers refocused his attention to where they stood and elbowed his comrade. If they headed this way, there wasn’t a chance in hell she wouldn’t be identified, and after yesterday’s tragedy, the FF discovering Bulma Briefs wasted in the middle of the night in front of an arcade bar was a circumstance that begged harassment. 

Her stomach lurched at the sickening thought of being shoved up against a brick wall, humiliated and groped for a couple of bucks and game tokens. That was the best case scenario, because the combative temperament of the boy beside her would guarantee them both a one-way ticket to an FF holding cell. Bulma grabbed him by his flask-toting wrist and strode away from the soldiers at a fast clip, flipping her hood up as she went. She wasn't going to take any chances that they’d spot her rather identifiable blue hair and dredge-up the motivation for trouble. 

“What the hell, woman!” the boy carped.

“We have to go.”

He glanced behind him. “Why? You got a warrant out with the FF?”

“Something like that. Just shut up and keep walking.”

His clever trap stayed shut as they traversed the sidewalks toward her apartment. But a major intersection left them stranded without an alley or roundabout route, forced to park feet away from another pair of soldiers and wait for the light to change. Bulma’s heels bounced nervously against the pavement. She tugged the edge of her hood further over her face and sidled closer to the guy, half-turned towards him to shield herself from view.

“Hey!” the voice of the man she was braced against rumbled from his lungs, calling the soldiers’ attention right to them. What the fuck was he doing? He wrapped one arm tightly around her, cinching her against him and mumbled, “Just play along.”

“You look like you could use this,” he said and held out the flask.

The guards observed him with curious, shifting glances and exchanged a few words between each other in Icejin before lowering themselves to address her new dumb friend in Saiyago.

“What is it?” one hissed, plucking the flask from his outstretched hand. He unscrewed the cap to smell its contents before testing a sip. Whatever it was, the soldier’s nodding expression said he approved, so much that his partner quickly snatched it away to take a swig himself.

Compared to the general populace, Bulma’s risk tolerance was undoubtedly in the 90-th percentile, which meant, even if the idiot beside her had wagered a fortune on a dare and meant to split the profit, approaching the FF to toss back drinks like they were old bar buddies put him somewhere north of an impossible 110-th. A little forewarning would have been a nice, substandard courtesy. 

But no… the lunatic chose to double-down on batshit like he was begging to be shot, answering the soldier's question about the flask’s contents with a cool shrug, and for reasons that only the voices in his head would understand, he said, “Here I was worried the arsenic might taint the flavor.”

Bulma’s jaw fell open in a slow spell of shock to mirror the soldiers. If the Icejin weren’t pale enough already, their pallor drained to look as grey and lifeless as the frothy-lipped corpses they believed they were about to become. 

_Why? Why why why?_ Unless he really was a member of the Shadow Army and this was a creative suicide mission to get her killed, it was… not crazy, Bulma realized with sinking dread. Taking a bullet in the head by the FF, seemingly unprovoked out in the open with a line of traffic backed-up at the light would be just the scratch the Resistance needed to turn Capsule’s members into a bloodthirsty horde of Shadows. 

When the soldiers moved to flip their rifles, Bulma shrieked, but she didn’t run for her life. Instead, abandoning all logic, she buried her face into the man’s chest and clung to him like he was made of fucking kevlar and willing be her shield. 

The next sound that cracked the air wasn’t the bullet she expected, but a deep cough of laughter. 

“Oh, relax. It was a joke. Most people find them funny,” he said, probably smirking like finding himself on the receiving end of the barrels of two trigger-ready privates was a hilarious punchline they were too sane to appreciate. “It’s decent whiskey, probably a crime to waste any more on this lush." He gave Bulma a rough little shake that said she wasn't the one that ought to lay-off the flask. "The wife doesn’t know when to quit. I figured you gentleman would appreciate the rest and save me the trouble of carrying this sad sack of fermented potatoes all the way home... again. Win-win.”

Good god. If the man had an ounce of body fat, Bulma would have sunk her nails to pinch the fucker. Provoking her to scream and throw herself at him wasn’t entertaining enough, he had to heckle a win and cast her in the unflattering role of his soppy spouse. Maybe he was blonde enough to pass for a mutt and they believed him, but judging by their confused, scrunched features, the inbred lackeys were still running the math on whether or not the product of little gag was funnier than it was insulting. Either way, it gave them a head start to cross the street when the light turned with Bulma pretending to stumble against him like some three legged race. 

“Hey!” one of the guards shouted at their backs; though the odds that he sought to deliver a thank you for the booze were slim to none. The boy attached to her hip didn’t miss a step. He responded with an enthusiastic salute and short quip in Icejin that, from the few words Bulma undersood, sounded like overdone flattery. 

“Keep up the good work, huh?” she chided once they were out of earshot. “Well shucks, Eddie, you think they bought it? Maybe you outta jog back real quick and tell ‘em how well that armor complements their figures.”

“I hope you’re taking notes, just in case this whole cloaked perp in a spotlight number ever fails you.”

“Something tells me its success rate is a tad higher than gotcha poison pranks.” 

Any rational person, even an adrenaline junkie still high on the adorable clickity-clacks of semi-automatic rifle chambers being loaded in his face would at least have the sense to acknowledge, and ideally apologize for assuming she’d be down to stake her life for a short-sighted yuck, like spooking a couple FF patrols into pissing themselves was a worthy end game. 

He chose to fake a yawn and shift the subject, as if ten seconds at gunpoint without a single shot fired was the boring equivalent to being trapped in an elevator for twenty minutes with anyone that wasn’t a pretty, young girl he could seduce by pretending to hold the leaderboard on staring contests and rock-paper-scissors tournaments. With eyes like that, he was probably good at staring cont–

“Hello! Earth to princess.”

“What?” Bulma snapped, after a few lost seconds of focus.

“I - take - it - you’re - bi - lingual,” he mocked, loud and slow, like she was both hard of hearing and barely proficient in their native language. 

“Mostly just the dirty words.” That was the truth, and it had the added bonus of misdirecting the smartass whose arm was still hugged around her. He was easy to puppet and more reactive than a cartoon, bugging his eyes at the notion she had some twisted bedroom kink for the Icejin’s split-tongued language. Before he could deliver some cute, suggestive quip, she’d lay the punk out flat for assuming that a similar display of flattery from her, even if it came with a top shelf peace offering that she didn’t pretend to poison, could ever produce the same result. “When you spend enough time commuting on foot with checkstops like that at every corner, you’d be surprised how often run-of-the-mill objectification ends in gross fantasies those soldiers would rather die than repeat in front of their mothers, things that will have you making a hard left turn into the nearest bodega, pretending to debate noodle shapes for twenty minutes until they grow bored and move along.”

Bulma meant to trip-up the maniac and send his pompous ego fleeing like an archetypal mash-up from a campy slasher film—the ignorant, skirt-chasing jock and the cynical stoner realizing their mutual love interest, some Disneyland Princess with D-cups, had just met her tit-stabbing demise and the killer in pursuit wasn’t sexist as much as pragmatic. 

Absent of bribes and brown-nosing compliments in the FF’s hiss of a language, he was just as vulnerable to a poke in the back by an M16 as she was. But that realization was a reach for him, and at best, she thought he’d roll his eyes. She wasn’t remotely prepared for the shadow that twitched over his features and, for one unsettling second, made him look like a villainous plot twist. It was fast, so much that chalking it up to paranoid delusion seemed more reasonable than ruining a good record by scraping it backward for clues that fit her psycho killer theory. 

Bulma watched his smarmy grin switch-on in profile, like she’d just turned the knob on the television during commercials and clicking back found he’d returned to his regular sarcastic programming. 

“Well if that’s the case, we should switch Bond names, because lone, late-night bar ventures scream deathwish… unless you count on seducing gallant knights to escort you home.”

“Can’t win ‘em all. Sometimes you’re reduced to settling for a five-and-a-half foot poseur.”

“I’m a poseur?” His tone brightly leaped as if he found the comment intriguing, and if he was posing as anything, it was a guru of ironic enlightenment.

A cheap shot at his stature didn’t nick his confidence, and while questioning his commitment to his fashion sense clearly didn’t appear to either, it was still interesting that of the two, calling him a phony was the insult he picked to arm wrestle. 

“Aren’t you? How would your friends feel about you paying lip service to the FF?” 

“Depends. They’d have to get a good look at you first,” he said, and as if he hadn’t gotten a good enough look himself, his hand left her hip to land heavy on her shoulder. With a crude shove, he held her at arm’s length and made a dramatic show of his appraisal like he’d just won a long-shot filly in a claims stake, and what she lacked in pedigree, she made up for in beauty and gumption. “You’ll pass,” he concluded.

“Oh goody. I’d hate to upset such a noble ethos. Anarchy with an asterisk. No gods, no government, except where there’s a nice pair of boobs.”

“Or boners. It’s a surprisingly progressive philosophy, but a few bad apples, as they say...” The boy rocked his head from side to side with his lips tucked in a teasing expression. “What? You disapprove? Should I have shuddered like a chihuahua and chucked your ass at them as bait, or maybe you were hoping I’d wing chun ‘em unconscious. I hate to hold a pillow over a fantasy, but I’m more your American go-for-the-gun type… hypothetically speaking. Of the two, I’d place my bets on Clint Eastwood surviving Bruce Lee in an Icejin Apocalypse.”

An anarchist’s reverence for a lawless Hollywood cowboy made sense, but absent of honing a talent for sharp-shooting on horseback, she wondered if he hadn’t honed a more useful talent for acting, and he wasn’t Clint Eastwood as much as he was Andy Kaufman with a bit caught between his teeth, cantering out of control.

“Are you still pretending you don’t know who I am?” Bulma asked, trying to rein him back on track. Regardless if he wasn’t a diehard Shadow soldier willing to splatter his brains for their cause, his earlier comment outside the bar still left her wondering if he knew who she was.

“Is this a game? Fuck it, let’s make it one. I’ll guess!” With no shortage of enthusiasm, he wrenched her hoodie from her head. “You don’t have a warrant, but an ordinary snake would recognize you, which means you’re in the public.”

“Wow, Columbo. Your powers of deduction are inspiring,” Bulma groused.

“I’m not done. You could be alt-press, or a counterculture artist, a writer or performer. If you were ten years older, I’d say you were a politician. So maybe you’re the spawn of one. Or maybe you’re a politician in training pants… A student on a soapbox.”

“Warmer.”

“Which one?”

“Student on a soapbox is a bullet on my resume.”

“So a professional at a podium, then. A recognizable one with pretty blue hair, like Bulma Briefs, the puppetmaster of the students and the crates they stand on.” 

“Quite an endorsement, asshole. Did you just come up with that? Or did you know all goddamn night?”

“Not until you started sweating all over the sidewalk. I’m not into politics to be honest.”

Did he have fucking amnesia? Maybe he was a pathological liar whose mouth was too fast to filter out bullshit, forcing Bulma to remind him, “Less than a minute ago, you pledged allegiance to the black flag.”

“More like a black amp. Music and politics aren’t mutually exclusive. I don’t give a shit about one of them.” 

Bulma doubted he was telling the truth, and a little bitter about his snarky reduction of the Capsule movement. It wasn’t just politics. It was human rights, people’s real lives that they were fighting to improve. But if five years on the job had taught her anything, it was that regardless of the evidence, most people were aggressively lazy, and stubborn and impossible to persuade. She was in no mood to pick an argument with this one.

“Fine. I showed you mine. What’s your real name, TBL?” she asked, as they arrived at the stoop of her building.

“Guess!”

“How the fuck would I guess?” A coy grin hooked his lips, and she couldn’t wait to smother it. After all, she was the one with leverage. “You want to come up?”

“Since you refuse to give me my keys, I don’t have a choice.”

“Oh, that’s not true,” Bulma mused and clicked her tongue against her teeth. “I’m not giving you your keys until morning, for your own safety of course. So either you sleep it off on the steps, or you tell me your name. I might let you sleep inside.”

“It’s Tarble,” he grumbled.

“Fancy like a prince. Tarble what?”

“Breigh. Anything else? Do you want a copy of my birth certificate? Perhaps my blood type?”

“And your last three paystubs,” she teased. 

Damn, maybe the serial killer theory wasn’t so ridiculous, or perhaps he was the one with a warrant, because he acted as if saying his name out loud three times could spontaneously summon a squadron of FF from ether. 

Bulma stepped ahead of him and flicked the switch on the hallway light out of habit that had been burnt out for weeks. She swallowed down a laugh as he followed behind her in the dark with the rickety stair boards moaning beneath their feet. If he was a murderer, the setup was far too cliché to admit she didn’t deserve to be slaughtered.

Shooing the cat away from the door with her foot, she let the strange man into her apartment—or room rather, the squalor of which wasn’t unique and didn’t appear to register with her guest who bent to indulge the needy animal that sniffed at his boots. 

Short of a private bathroom, it still had the essentials. There was a kitchenette with a portable stove top that took up all but a sliver of counter space, a microwave that hissed and rattled like a jet engine preparing for take off, and a mini fridge that was either dammed-up with ice or room temperature. She had a desk, a bed, a dresser with unfolded laundry spilling from its two broken drawers that never closed. And of course, plenty of liquor.

“Do you want a drink?” Bulma asked, already foraging under the sink for a bottle that wasn’t completely trash. 

“I’m a sworn alcoholic.”

He was slowly walking the periphery of her space with the cat cradled in his arms, rubbing its cheeks. Being nice to animals dispelled one notable marker of a serial killer.

“It’s shit,” Bulma warned him. 

“Hardly matters at this point.” 

He took the glass without looking away from the photograph that hung above her desk: a portrait of her parents’ from their wedding day standing on the steps of a small, stone church in the uptown district across the river where they both had been raised.

“You look like her,” Tarble said. 

Bulma didn’t have to guess whether he meant it as a compliment or not. Her mother was flawless, a porcelain kind of beauty that despite their circumstances, she took great care to uphold, winding curlers into her hair every night despite being too weak to leave their flat.

“Are they around?”

“Nope. Passed within months of each other when I was fifteen.” 

She sensed his nervous curiosity in the way he opened his mouth, a question hanging from it, but thought better and put his glass to his lips instead. It didn’t require a mathematician to count backward to The Fall and the years that followed, where the Icejin army ruthlessly hunted the monarchy’s loyalists and their families. It wasn’t the case with hers, just coincidence, but if that’s where his mind went, it would explain his reluctance to tell her his name. If Tarble was the product of such a family, he would be cagey about his identity. She’d known Goku just short of a decade, and while he’d told her in confidence that he was listed, an escapee from Frieza’s purge, he would never tell her his real name. If she had money, she’d bet that Tarble’s was fake too. 

He remained quiet, his gaze oddly fixed on her parents' photograph, almost lost in it like it was a precious work of art.

“So, Tarble from uptown. What do you do?”

“Bartend a venue,” he said and raised his glass half-heartedly. He dropped the cat on the bed before he sat down himself, shrugged off his jacket, and reclined back with his drink resting on his stomach.

“Followed your passion.”

“Yes, it seems we’re both doing God’s work.” He cracked open his eyes and brought an arm around to pillow the back of his head, gazing up at her. “You look uncomfortable.”

“I’m not,” she lied. 

She was sufficiently uncomfortable. More than the fallen temperature of his mood, which was now barely lukewarm, she was self-conscious of the intentions she’d had when she invited the strange man into her home. It certainly wasn’t par for the course when it came to her extracurricular activities, not that she really had any, with men or otherwise. A night of reckless fun wasn’t a common occurrence. Reckless destruction, however, certainly was—drinking and smoking alone, caught in a brainstorm on a good night, or a cyclone of depression on a bad one, both events culminating in the same outcome: her organs shut down, and she woke-up moaning in the throes of death with a sandpaper cat tongue scratching against her throbbing forehead. This wasn’t so different, not in terms of the feeling. Maybe the difference was simply that she happened to be out rather than holed-up in her sad bunker by herself. 

She was in over her head and growing tired, more and more. Every win, every consolation she’d obtained through Capsule was followed by some small-print caveat or straight-up smoke and mirrors. The presidential election, after they’d spent three years demanding one, was a win on the surface but meant jack shit when the Feds were the only party to count the ballots. The Shadow Army made things inexorably harder when it came to keeping the movement alive and preventing their group voice from splintering off toward the Resistance or giving-up to despondency and disappointment all together.

The boy sat up and hooked a foot around the back of her leg, breaking her balance to tug her toward him. She fell into his lap sloshing whiskey down the front of his shirt. But he pretended not to notice, or maybe he didn’t care, given his occupation, or state of drunkenness, or assumption that he was about to get laid. 

She was propped in the crook of his free arm with her head on his shoulder when he kissed her. His lips pressed against hers with less force than she’d anticipated from the speed of his movements, like he read the room and managed to check himself mid-air and impose a kind of chivalry, letting a simple kiss linger like a long held breath until they parted.

In a way, she wished he hadn’t overthought the act, or spoiled their earlier snarky repartee by asking about her parents, or maybe she undid it when she demanded to know his name. Her own mood would have sunk hours ago, but he kept walking her back from the gloomy precipace with cheeky quips and stupid games. But now, even he felt heavy, a weight that could possibly plummet her thoughts faster than she could drop them by herself. 

“I’m sorry. I thought I wanted… I didn’t mean to lead you on. I can’t give you your keys, but if you’ll drink some water and–”

“Damn, woman,” he interrupted. He wrapped his palm around her jaw to squeeze her cheeks together like a fish. Shaking her face, his villainous smile returned. “You’re high-fucking-octane. Do you ever relax? Maybe try breathing, in and out. It sounds like witchcraft, but I hear it’s a miracle cure for self affixation.”

She wasn’t breathing, she realized once he so impishly commanded her to start. He placed his drink on her desk and took her own from her hand to do the same. Then, with his palms lightly laid on her hips, he scooted out from under her slowly with an exaggerated delicateness like he was removing a homemade explosive from his lap. He was a funny one, alright, so dry that he was very possibly unaware of his own humor.

He unlaced his boots, chucked them onto the rug, then shifted to lay properly on her bed. Blonde or not, he was fucking gorgeous, staring up at her with sharp, dark eyes and the sleeves of his t-shirt slid-up above his biceps, like he was a calendar boy, Mr. fucking November. But what the hell did he get out of this? If she wasn’t going to sleep with him yet refused to let him turn himself into roadkill on a high-speed motorcycle, what the hell did he want? Why was he humoring her at all? Maybe she was the asshole for assuming he was a dog, narrowly capable of chasing his nose up her skirt and would sulk or leave without the promise of a good rut. 

“Can you sleep? Or do you need some assistance?” he smirked.

Ugh, maybe not. Was he pulling a line? If she laid down, would he lend his so-called assistance by sliding a hand between her legs. That was how these players rolled, wasn’t it? Give a little, get a lot. 

“Lay down, you goddamned human migraine, before you give me one,” he demanded, pressing himself up from his comfy posture to point at the space beside him on her bed. 

Bulma eyed him as she laid down against the pillow. Staring overhead, his expression unreadable with brows slightly pinched as if annoyed, but his tone was the opposite when he softened it and said, “Turn over.” 

“Excuse me?”

He looped his finger in the air directing her to shift onto her stomach. And as soon as she was facing the pillows, he climbed over the top of her, straddling her back, and lightly settled to sit atop her ass. He helped her shimmy backward out of her coat and tossed it aside. She felt his hands press into her back, and he began to circle his thumbs into her flesh over the thin material of her t-shirt. Slowly, he trailed the motion upward along her spine, working his thumbs into the tight cords of muscle to bust apart a decade’s worth of pent-up tension. It felt good, too good, and she bit her lip to keep from making noises he might mistake for a kind of pleasure she thought she’d wanted, but abandoned back at the bar. 

“Are you a masseuse on the side?” she tried to joke, but her voice caught halfway up her throat to sound in pain. She wasn’t, but the sensation was intense, and she stiffened beneath his hands.

“Are you made of lead? Relax.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Stop whining. Just fucking breathe.”

Breathe, he was right. She dragged her mind to the present, determinedly focused on the simple task of drawing and expelling air. _Relax, breathe._ It made all the difference, and the force and motion of his fingers melting her like candle wax felt like she could sink into the mattress. Maybe he should be a masseuse. The tips at some high-end spa for the Icejin upper-crust were undoubtedly better than whatever dive he tended, and those women would be drawing blood from their manicured claws, fighting for a regular spot on his schedule. 

His hands were strong and spun the right amount of pressure into the right spaces. But the more he ground his fingers against her like her whole goddamn back was a giant pretzel, twisted and deep fried, the more she felt herself losing her grip, as if hidden deep beneath the petrified tissues were ten years of blunted personal feelings. 

When he asked her if her family was alive, she said nope, not no, but ‘nope,’ as if the question was whether or not she liked black licorice. She was anything but unfeeling. Her father’s altruistic profession as a community doctor was the reason she was pushing herself at all. And every damn person that knew her would testify that she was a trip that disembarked at every stop along the path of human emotion. At her worst, she was a dramatic, viscious, hotheaded nightmare, and at her best, she was an overstimulated, frantic, ambitious optimist, who was probably still a fucking nightmare. She was a sieve that let every feeling through except her own. 

_Relax, breathe_ , she meant to, she thought she could, she didn’t want him to stop, but she couldn’t stop herself. Hard as she tried to constrict her throat and tie-off her stupid fucking eyes, she couldn’t contain the wave of sobs that split between her lips and tears that broke free from their ducts. She pressed her face into the pillow, hoping he didn’t notice. Why the fuck was she crying when she wasn’t fucking sad? She was tired, running on fumes that were clearly toxic and eroding her goddamn mind. 

Desperately, she wanted to kill the sensation, bury it, feel something different, something that could curb whatever fucking voodoo he cracked loose in her veins. Bucking against his hands, she shimmied to her back and felt for the button of his jeans. 

“Bulma, we don’t have to–”

“Please just shut up. I promise I’m not a fucking mess a hundred percent of the time. But I am human. I’m not perfect. And I don’t give a damn if you recognized me or not, or if you think I’m an immature, drunk piece of shit. Most people’s opinions aren’t worth my time. I’m coping. And I’m trying, and doing the fucking best I can. But right now, I just want to take one fucking night off, get laid and have it not be a thing.”

He remained inert above her, his expression blank, like he didn’t know what to make of her waffling emotions and was afraid to make a move. Bulma rolled her eyes and spit in her hand before she slipped it under his waistband to coax him to life. He was already half hard, and it didn’t require more than a few strokes to rouse a response. His eyelids fluttered shut, and his head dropped to hang between his shoulders, stifling a moan, before he lurched it up, forced his eyes open just long enough to gauge her complicity. 

He dropped to his elbows to kiss her, sweeping his tongue between her lips, but too slow and sweetly, like she was a fragile virgin that might disintegrate beneath him. Goddammit. She should have fucked him in the grimy bathroom at the arcade when he cared less about her precious feelings. Nothing was going to get her off unless she took the lead. The second his tongue was out of range, she found his bottom lip with her teeth and bit down hard until she tasted blood. 

Tarble shot upright, eyes wide as he brushed his lip. A wicked smile spread across his face when he saw the ruby stain on the pad of his thumb, like she’d just unlocked the caged door to free the animal from whatever staged obedience he thought she required. 

He tore his t-shirt over his head and tossed it to the floor, then waited, perched above her, clearly entertained by his own curtain call as her gaze roamed up from the swelling outline of his cock, to his rigid stomach and muscular chest, and his smirking expression as he raised an eyebrow to mock, “A bit feral for a pacifist.” 

“Cute,” Bulma said, and grabbed his crotch just hard enough to watch his pompous ego deflate with a sharp suck of air and make him wonder just how feral she really was. She felt his dick kicking beneath the fabric and grinned. But he was far too distrusting, and indulged her for only a moment. 

Peeling her hand off, he wrenched it above her head and bent to kiss her, putting power behind it this time, an energy that sent her hips arching toward him, pulling greedily at the belt loops of his pants to close the gap and feel the press of him between her legs. But he wasn’t so compliant to take direction, not anymore. She’d effectively cut his leash, eliminated the nervous mystery by which these stray encounters awkwardly tip-toed, and he was the type to relish that kind of power. The proverbial carrot, which was rather an apt metaphor, was yanked away with a buck of his hips. His mouth left her too, before she’d had much of a chance to taste him. He’d pushed himself up to hover above her on all fours.

“Didn’t take you for a tease,” she sneered. 

He smiled with a saucy little toss of his head that was almost effeminate. Gods, he was going to make this difficult, move painfully slow in some give and take head game until she grew frustrated enough to beg. Was that his intention? Beyond just fucking the founder of the Capsule movement, he wanted to her to plead and grovel too? A story like that would make him the prince of the punk scene. Her face soured at the thought. 

Perhaps he caught her annoyance, because his hands suddenly smoothed up her sides beneath her shirt to pull the garment from her head. Making quick work of unfastening her pants, he tugged them off and tossed them to the floor, then dove under her legs, catching them over his shoulders. A noise of surprise left her throat at the pressure of his fingers as they pushed between them and his warm mouth dragged up her thigh to settle against her with a roll of his tongue. She squirmed and fought to keep her legs apart, avoid clam-shutting his head as he began to work his mouth and hands in tandem. 

There was none of the overcautious delicacy that the short list of men she’d been with before assumed was some requisite in a manual on lady parts—not that those types of guys would have read it had it existed due to some prepubescent fear of the word vagina. Nope, this one would have read it twice, tested its methods, and sent disparaging letters to the editor with corrections. 

Hell, he could write the book, Bulma thought as she dug her heels into the sheets, bracing for the sweet rush of an orgasm. Her fingers that threaded his hair grabbed hold, and she bit her lip with a hum. But the moment she began to tremble, he pulled his mouth off her with a pop and sat up. 

_God fucking dammit._ What the hell was wrong with him? Bulma drew her leg up to kick him, but he caught her by the ankle and smiled something mischievous. So swift and seamless was the maneuver as he dragged her to the foot of the bed, flipped her over, and wrapped his arm around her shoulders to pull her upright until her back was flush against his chest—her instinct didn’t have a chance to second guess him. 

There was just enough of a pattern to his unpredictability that he composed with the verve of experimental jazz. He was inspired by the unexpected, even surprises of his own making. It was the same back at the arcade. Every attempt to frustrate him was met with a bright spark, as if his pupils were a grate to guard the spitting filament that ignited behind them. He let the flame erupt before he dialed it back to a simmer and traced his lips along her neck. She felt short of breath, as if he was extracting the air, siphoning it through the pores of her skin as he trailed a path along her shoulder. Her eyes drifted shut as her head fell back against him.

Despite knowing exactly what was coming, the unmistakable rustle of clothes and shifting hips, she still felt as if the air was knocked from her lungs when he began to push himself inside. Slow and controlled as his movements were, the pressure was exquisitely intense. Every press felt heavy, tingling down her legs, numbing her toes. It wasn’t like he had some magical, massive dick. Maybe it was the angle or the fact that he was obviously well versed, like he had a daytime sidegig as some bored noblewoman’s poolboy. 

The rhythm with which he began to steer his thrusts rolled like waves against her backside, and she gripped his arm to keep from toppling over. But the moment his palm smoothed down her stomach, dancing every nerve across her skin, and dipped between her legs, a rush of heat sent her arching toward the mattress. She pulled him down with her, wanting nothing more than to bury her face against the comforter and feel the weight of a warm body, close off every nagging thought and tunnel her focus on the sensation.

It helped that he didn’t ask questions, not one well-meaning but wholly buzz-killing utterance to ask if she was okay, if it felt good, if she was close. His ego certainly cared about all of those facets, but it was the very same ego that made those types of questions irrelevant—as if stifling her moans into a pillow and bucking her hips back as he picked up the pace was a pretty good indication. 

She was vaguely aware of her own voice dampened by a mouthful of foam filling. But the texture of his, like the crunch of gravel beneath bike tires was something unexpected and far richer felt than heard. His voice vibrated up her spine to crumble whatever fortification he’d erected to hide any sign that he was human and subject to the same vulnerabilities as the next lonely soul. She thought he’d choke it off, tip over the edge of ecstasy with his lips muted together, convinced that this whole interaction was for her sake, and he was doing her a favor. But he was nothing if not full of fucking surprises. 

If he was some drink-slinging, pretty blonde bartender with a stack of phone numbers on his chits, he dropped the hot-to-trot pretension. His nose burrowed into her hair like it was a portal to Narnia, and his mouth laid against her neck, lips humming, and his arms hugged around her. She almost forgot he was a stranger. It was oddly comforting, even if it was some heat of the moment slip from the careful act he’d been playing all night. 

The roll of his hips became more frantic. Every thrust felt like she was going to burst apart, and every circle of his fingers between her legs, warm and buzzing, brought her closer. But it was the simple motion of him brushing the hair from her shoulder that did it. God she was a fucking sap. Heat rushed through her body as he shifted his weight forward just enough to tip her face toward him, stifling the sound of relief against her lips.

***

The boy she’d brought home was still asleep when Bulma woke at a predictable dawn. She went about her routine, brewing coffee and climbing through the window to her fire escape to sit in a quiet stupor, sipping at the bitter beverage, waiting for it to shock her arrested mind back into rhythm and rinse the taste of alcohol and doom from her tongue.

Only a few days a year could she witness the actual sunrise peek between the buildings from this vantage. Today was not one of them, but she still dragged her hungover ass to sit on the rusty steps, light a cigarette, and stare off into the orange haze as it slowly turned to daylight and woke the city around her. 

The iron platform creaked and moaned. Bulma watched Tarble tread the brittle planks on the balls of his feet, a look of indignation directed toward the extremities, as if his toes themselves had chosen to be barefoot. He padded around the stairs, eclipsing the sunlight from view as he stood before her, wrapping his fists around the railings at each side of her head. 

Somehow, the skewed perception of desperation and drunkenness had little effect on the man; if anything, he was more attractive now. A halo of light glowed behind him that belied the dark, enigmatic persona she spent the entire night trying to piece into something she could understand. Not that she was on her game, but this one defied all logic. He was the human equivalent of an impossible staircase. Just when she thought she’d deduced his motivations, he’d hook her off-course, yet still lead her uphill toward him. He trapped her in some trippy wormhole that made only enough sense to keep her brain spitting out dopamine as she opened doors to nowhere.

Like now, the way his gaze tunneled on her felt like it spanned a spectrum between animalistic hunger, like he wanted to consume her and pick his pretty teeth with her bones, and empathy, like the crisis of her emotional shitshow from the previous night was a thing he shared, even struggled with, but was just better at caging. 

“You’re staring,” she told him. Despite knowing that he did nothing without intention, she still felt compelled to lay it out in the open, waft a hand at his perpetual smoke screen. “Honestly, I figured you’d have taken your keys and left by now.”

His voice was hollow, weakened by too many drinks and lack of sleep as he rasped, “Woman, do you realize what time it is?”

“Six, roughly. I have to work soon.”

At that he rolled his eyes in an impressive display of condescension for being half asleep. “Those leaflets won’t distribute themselves.”

“Cute.” 

He couldn’t help himself, could he? Whether he was into politics as he cynically disputed or not, she still wasn’t convinced that her identity didn’t dawn on him before they left the arcade. He was intelligent, and conniving, and clearly a great actor to dodge the usual FF pat down with bribery. He was into politics the same as every citizen was coerced to be peripherally. It didn’t mean they weren’t privy to the battles fought on their behalf. They were just resentful of them, like a poking a stick into the water might create a turbulence they weren’t interested in feeling, much less preventing. They’d rather wait until the Federation stripped them bare before they complained out in the open. 

While older adults had familial obligations to excuse their lack of participation to an extent, it was the youth, selfish ones like him, that didn’t make sense. At a guess, they didn’t value the cause because the stakes weren’t high enough to matter, and they were used to a serving of scraps as the status quo and assumed that hitting thirty was some kind of magical milestone to usher opportunities. A broken microwave and ramen noodles weren’t so bad as a single at twenty-five, but past the blessing of youth and health, the stakes compounded exponentially. 

While Tarble was probably earning just enough to be complacent behind the bar, exist as this strange creature he was—some cross between pretty underwear model, cocky arcade nerd, functional alcoholic, and peroxide punk, he’d have a very rude awakening the second his perfect physique failed him and he required help that was unavailable. God forbid his hair dye ever give him cancer, or more likely, he impregnate some unfortunate girl and become responsible for feeding more than just his own smart mouth, or eventually develop an ambition above bartending that necessitated capital or an education. The strappings of poverty weren’t so bad when the job was semi-glamorous and you only had yourself to care for, but the minute the night life caught up to him, he’d be hard pressed to keep a tenement roof from caving-in over his head of probably naturally black hair. 

“If you must know, I work at a deli, a bodega technically. And my eighteen-year-old manager is a real hard-ass about my habitual tardiness.”

“Those sandwiches won’t make themselves.” He sniggered at his own dumb joke without diminishing the intensity of his gaze.

“Ha. It wasn’t funny the first time. And she won’t let me near the deli counter for reasons that are obvious if you know me. But I’m the best sub-standard cashier west of the river.” Bulma conceded to his dorky mood to fan herself. 

At the very least, she figured he’d smile again, or one-up her on camp jokes, but he did neither. He seemed edgy, shifting his weight between his feet. He continued to look at her with his brows slightly furrowed, like she was the puzzle, and his reliable wit was lost in the fog of a hangover, and whatever post-coital routine he was used to had capsized and left him treading water.

“If you keep staring at me like that, you might make me think you want to see me ag–.”

Before the comment had fully left her mouth, his grip on the railing suddenly jumped to the back of her neck, pulling her into a weighty kiss; as if their lips were hooked and barbed, she couldn’t breathe for as long as he held them together. She didn’t want it to end, but forced to break away for air, he didn’t let her go very far and kept his forehead propped firmly against hers.

“Come over again tonight,” she demanded, cupping her fingers around his chin. 

“Can’t, I work late. Tomorrow?”

“Can’t, community meeting. Hey, you should come!” ... Or not. He turned away, sneering and shaking his head like she’d just invited him to church and might trick him into a baptism. The melodrama was a little ripe for 6am. “Oh, come on! Even if you’re allergic to politics, you can’t tell me you wouldn’t enjoy watching me get chewed-out by a mob of angry pacifists.”

Squinting into the distance for a split second's consideration, he finally agreed, “That could be entertaining... You done with this?” His attention abruptly shifted to her cigarette. Without waiting for a response, he plucked it from her fingers and flicked it into the alley, freeing up her hand to lead her eagerly through the window.


	5. White Room

Goku had yet to learn the full context of his mission from his brother’s vague responses, but so far it was turning out to be a dull one. They’d been on the southbound highway for two hours, trailing behind a car whose occupants Raditz declined to identify. 

While his first excursion this far outside of the city should have excited him, it was the middle of the night, and there wasn’t any scenery visible beyond the shallow beam of his headlights. Though according to Raditz, there wasn’t much to look at anyway, just long stretches of dusty desert interspersed by a few small, ugly clusters of mountains whose only use served to mark their progress.

Goku turned up the radio to stay alert. The _Saturday Night Throwback_ that played the top songs from a decade ago was the only program that came in, and one with which he had a love-hate relationship. Its attempt at nostalgia often stirred up more anxiety than feel-good reminiscence like a soundtrack from a better life. 

“How much longer?” Goku asked. His brother’s head that was slung outside the window, hair blowing in the headwind, couldn’t hear him, or maybe he was asleep. Goku’s question was instead answered by the car they followed, which signaled and slowed just barely enough to peel across the north lane, throwing a cloud of dirt behind it as it headed into the desert. 

“Rad, do I follow them?” When his brother failed to respond, Goku obeyed the only directive he was given and tore off after the vehicle.

Raditz bounced awake, jostled by the rough terrain. His brother’s sedan was old, not exactly meant for off-roading. Neither was the other car, which now that Goku could see it clearly as he pulled up alongside, was a rather nice American-made coupe. 

“Where’d the import come from?” he asked. 

“Where do any of them come from?” his brother mumbled, massaging the sleep from his eyes. 

Any of them meant this one too—the beater his brother had him drive all the way to the Tuffelian border was probably just as stolen. Before Goku could issue grievances, the coupe’s driver’s side door swung open, and from it emerged a pretty blonde in skintight jeans and four inch heels. Her t-shirt left little to the imagination, cropped above her midriff with a neckline that plunged low over the tops of her breasts. A bright red handkerchief was tied around her slender neck. Whoever she was, she cured Raditz’s groggy prognosis. A grin split across his face, and he practically climbed out the window to howl like a wolf at the moon and bang his palm against the car door. 

“Hey baby, you wanna go halves on a bastard?” he snickered. The girl’s countenance kindled with disdain as she wagged her middle finger in their direction. “Aw, don’t be like that. I’m just sayin’ you clean up nice is all.”

The car’s other passenger circled around the back, smirking at the girl’s obvious discomfort as she crossed her arms and glared at him. He was a full head shorter than his high-heeled partner, clad entirely in black, and was tying a black bandana over his bright blonde hair as he strode toward Raditz’s window. 

“You done cocking off, shithead?” he asked with a hard shove against Raditz’s face. “Walkie on?”

“Walkie’s been on. Nothing yet.” Raditz said. He pulled a military grade walkie-talkie from the side door pocket, puffing his cheeks with a heavy sigh and shaking his mane, trying to sharpen his drifting focus back to the task at hand—a task Goku had yet to learn the broad scope of, let alone his role in it.

Goku watched the girl extract a pistol from the coupe's center console, checking its chamber before she tucked it into the back of her belt and threw a leather racing jacket over her shoulders. 

“Kat!” Raditz jabbed an elbow into his shoulder. “Look alive, broh.”

Goku snapped his attention back to his brother and the man at the window, whose eyebrow winged contemptibly as he looked him over.

“Kat, this is Nico. Nic, Kakarot, my brother. Over there’s Eighteen.” 

“Hi, I’m Goku,” he corrected, more than a little annoyed Raditz gave his real name. The hand he extended toward Nico was met with the man’s sneering lip, glaring at his palm like he was patient zero to an incurable plague. 

“Your job is to drive. If something goes wrong, you back us up, and pick us up, fucking fast. If all goes well, then you listen to this dipshit. Be on your goddamn toes, smoke a fucking cigarette or something. This isn’t nap time, Kakarot.”

“I’m awake,” Goku promised, a tinge of defense laced in his voice. It’s not like he was the one napping most of the drive.

Nico still seemed skeptical, but was forced to abandon his distrust when the walkie hissed to life, and Parris’s voice came through to tell them, “Five miles out. You set?”

“All good, buddy,” Raditz replied.

Nico banged a fist against twice against the door like a gong to signal the party to action then sprinted off on foot parallel to the road and disappeared into the darkness. 

A spray of dust pelted their windshield as Eighteen tore off in the same direction, parking the vehicle on the shoulder of the northbound lane. She left the car to idle with the door ajar, all of its lights on, and the radio blaring Cream’s _White Room_ into the night. Then she strode around to the front, pulled out her pistol, and with a pop, shot the front tire flat. 

“One mile,” said Parris.

When the bright lights of a semi truck became visible down the road, Eighteen crossed into the center of the lane, and as the semi drew closer, she tore the handkerchief from her neck and waved it in the air. The truck slowed to a stop beside her, and whatever she said to its occupants had them maneuvering off the road, parking the truck ahead of her car. 

A man climbed down from the passenger seat of the cab to chat with the girl. From a distance, it was clear she was soliciting his help with the flat—an irresistible damsel left helpless and horny on the side of the highway. He visibly wilted as she brushed a hand down his arm, and he followed her swaying hips to the trunk of the car, standing back to get a look at her backside as she bent to unlock it. More of the same fanning gestures had him leaning over the trunk, presumably to retrieve the spare tire.

Whatever plan was afoot, Goku sensed with a burgeoning dread, wasn’t one he wanted to witness, much less be an accomplice. 

“She’s not gonna–”

A crack that ripped the air halted the question on his lips, and before Goku could register the source, not a second later, Eighteen pulled her pistol on the unsuspecting soul that realized his mistake too late, whipping around to face her as she pulled the trigger. The stranger’s body propelled backward before he dropped, sliding down the bumper to lay in a limp heap on the pavement. 

“We’re up!” his brother’s voice steeped into his ears along with the song’s distorted guitars left blaring over the speakers of the vacant car. Goku watched in a daze as Eighteen ran to catch her ride in the truck Nico commandeered, leaping agilely into the moving cab he steered back onto the highway. 

It was the loud horn of the semi as they pulled away that shocked Goku’s mind back to life, jolted the aimless ricochet of his messy thoughts back into a pattern. They killed those guys in cold blood. And he was helping them, somehow, get away with it.

“Kat, fucking go!” Radtiz punched his shoulder with the hard point of his knuckles. 

Goku turned the ignition and cut the cursed radio that blasted back to life before he shifted gears. He was about to tear off onto the highway to follow the truck, but Raditz was shouting at him to stop and pull over near the coupe Eighteen and Nico had abandoned. 

“Hurry the fuck up!” Raditz commanded. He threw open his door and bounded down the road, shouting over his shoulder, “Put that one in the trunk!”

 _Put what in the what now?_ Goku knew exactly what Raditz was telling him to do, but it felt as if his mind was balking against the reality of the request as he slowly lifted himself from the front seat. 

“Move you idiot!” his brother screamed.

Goku’s stomach lurched up his throat as he approached. Blood spurted from the hole in the dead man’s head, pumping with the remnant beat of his heart. Gods, it was nothing like the movies. Not a puddle, but a lake was quickly growing beneath the body, encroaching toward the tips of his shoes.

Raditz’s shouting resumed. Goku watched wearily as his brother struggled to drag the lifeless truck driver down the road by his ankles. 

“What the hell is wrong with you? Don’t just stand there! Clock’s ticking!” he grunted.

It took every last nerve that composed his being to scoop-up the man at his feet and heft his body into the open trunk. The coppery smell of blood twisted his guts worse than seeing his glassy eyes that were open but fixed eerily on nothing, or folding his deadened limbs like luggage to stuff in the car’s tiny trunk. He slammed it shut with a sharp, shallow suck of breath. His hands were shaking and sticky, and frantically he rubbed his palms against his pant legs, which only made the stick worse.

“You good?” Raditz called as Goku slowly waded around to the hood in a daze. His brother didn’t wait for him to answer. He leaned inside the darkened cab and deposited a cylindrical metal device with a blinking red light on the lap of the corpse he’d stuffed into the driver’s seat. 

“Sixty seconds, brah. Time to boogie,” he said and yanked Goku by the arm to race them both back to their own car, this time directing him to the passenger seat. Raditz peeled off onto the highway, gears burning and filling the air with the stench of rubber.

As Goku watched the crime scene recede from the side mirror, an explosion blasted with a jarring clap that rocked the little coupe and punched out every window. Blackened-orange flames gushed through them, enveloping the vehicle in a plume of fire. 

“Rad, what the hell did we just do? Who were those guys?” he finally found the voice to ask.

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Don’t worry ‘bout– Don’t– Raditz! Your friends just killed those guys, an’ you made me help to– You made me…” His voice caught up his chest as he looked down at the garish state of his clothing, soaked through and clinging to his skin and the hair along his forearms, which grew itchy as the blood dried. He wanted it off… now. “We need to stop! I can’t–” He started yanking at his shirt collar in a panic, tearing off the buttons, unable to sit for another minute, much less the next two hours, wearing another man’s blood. “This isn’t what I thought– I can’t– Pull over!”

“Fucking relax!” Raditz barked. He wrenched Goku’s hand from his shirt and flung it at him. “If you’re worried about what that was, you can wring your precious conscience. They were FF. Kat, those trucks are full’a weapons our dear leader’s been importing from Tuffles. They’ve been delivering ‘em for months, long before your joke of an election. Frieza’s planning a war. That’s the fifth shipment we’ve intercepted. We’re just stealing what we can to defend ourselves, but it’s nothin’. At the rate he’s bringing ‘em across the border, he can subdue us and invade Acrosia before spring.”

For a second or two Goku stared passed his brother and said nothing, as if his mind had placed him in a waking coma to process the grisly scene now miles behind them with the information Raditz disclosed. He was perhaps less surprised than he should have been that the first thought to issue clearance out of his mouth had nothing to do with believing Raditz. 

“Subdue us why? He’s already won here.”

“You don’t fuckin’ believe that, clearly, or you wouldn’t be in the Capsule Corps. All he did was shave the monarchy and upper crust down to nothin’ to make the rest of ‘em feel like they were somehow winnin’ when they weren’t. I mean, they aren’t. He just exterminated the Saiyan lords and ladies and replaced ‘em with his own. Nobody’s any better off. But he gives ‘em just enough to let ‘em keep thinkin’ they are, keep the placebo workin’ in his favor until he’s got enough force behind him to not have to give a shit at all. That day’s comin’ sooner than ya think. And when it does, then everyone’s on the list, not just the monarchy’s loyalists, but anyone that says or does anything that contradicts him.”

“How do you know?”

An expulsion of air rippled his brother’s lips as if biding time, weighing the risk of telling Goku more than he was likely authorized to share. He whittled it down only to say, “We’ve got good intel.”

“What’s that mean, like moles?”

“You didn’t hear it from me.”

“You have moles in the FF?”

His brother glared at him sideways in warning before he confirmed, “Three of ‘em. And if you repeat that to anyone, Nic will pop a hot one in your head like that soldier, mine too for tellin’ ya. Actually, it’d probably be Eighteen. Killin’s the only thing that puts a sparkle in her dead eyes.”

It was difficult to tell if he was kidding the way one side of his lips pulled to smile.

“They’re both listed I’m guessin’? Eighteen’s a strange name,” Goku commented. While the identities their Acrosian allies forged for Saiyan loyalists were mostly foolproof, the ones that could afford to pay a premium for their paperwork often picked names that were ridiculously suspect, enough to negate the value of their hefty price tag. 

“Most of us are listed,” said Raditz. “Look, Kat. I get that you were just a kid when that shit happened, and you found people that helped you make some sense out of it. I’m glad it was them and not me, ‘cause you deserved a chance at growin’ up without hatin’ everyone. You got a perspective I’m never gonna understand, just like you’re never gonna see mine fully. I’m real sorry if I didn’t prepare you for something that is a regular fucking Saturday night to me, but I know you know deep down that we have to do it. 

“I’m not a bad person, and neither is Nic, or Eighteen, or Parris or most of the Resistance. The collateral damage at that march was a mistake, not somethin’ we consciously were planning on. We’re not in the business of killing kids and innocents like Frieza. We kill soldiers, and it doesn't matter to us if they’re just doin’ their jobs, ‘cause they made the choice. Nobody’s forcing ‘em to be what they are. They can resign, find their paychecks somewhere else. But if they’re hellbent on makin’ a livin’ by hustling ammo across the border for Frieza fucking Cold, ammo that’s gonna be used on us and our neighbors, then frankly, we’re bein’ fucking sweethearts for delivering a kill shot before we light their shit on fire.”

While it was a relief to hear Raditz take responsibility for the casualties of their explosive stunt, Goku still failed to see the point of it beyond making a statement. The Shadow Army’s demolition of the Fall Monument wasn’t a strategic maneuver meant to gain ground in their war. It was an arrogant, selfish personal message for Frieza Cold. No decent commander would green light something so stupidly petty even if the collateral risk was near zero. They may not have anticipated the damage their bomb caused, but they were certainly planning for the stunt to provoke the FF’s retaliation against peaceful protesters. 

Raditz was right about one thing. FF soldiers had as much free will as the next person. The voices of the ones that searched the shop were permanently seared in Goku's memory. It was a game to them. They ransacked the place as they went along, trying to coax him out of hiding through cruel taunts, claiming his mother was looking for him. 

“They killed her, you know.”

“Who?” asked Raditz.

“I wasn’t with her. I didn’t see it. Nobody even came to check. It was like all of ‘em, everyone we knew just stopped bein’ the same people once we were flagged. She knew too. She told me not to open the door for anyone, even if we knew ‘em, especially if we knew ‘em. I only overheard what happened to her from what the soldiers told the landlord when they accosted him about us, lookin’ for you an’ me. But he didn’t have anything to tell him, ‘cause he was never there except for the check every fifth, but they didn’t care, acted like he was lying or somethin’. They didn’t kill him then, but they beat him up and arrested him. 

“I’m not naive like you think, Raditz. I hid from ‘em for a year until I got my paperwork. I’ve been arrested before too, three times actually. I know the difference between a weekend in the fed box and a Tuffleain prison camp or execution. And it’s not like Capsule has a hotline to Freiza Cold. He’s just humorin’ us. And Bulma, she’s smart, but she’s got it in her head that we can’t be nothin’ like them at any cost, no in-between. We’re either good, or we’re not. She’d sit cross-legged with a halo of guns at her head like she believes in people that much that it’d stop every one of them from firing. That’s the problem. She’s never been hunted like us. She doesn’t understand how easy people turn. They don’t need money to betray you. Fear is stronger.”

The discouraging feelings he’d been harboring for Capsule Corps. as of late weighed heavily as he watched the dark road pass beneath them. But even if the Shadow Army’s intel was true, and they were the only ones that stood a chance at stopping Frieza, Goku didn’t have the stomach to participate in the kinds of acts he’d just witnessed. His father was a soldier, and Raditz was now too, but that’s where the family trade ended.

“I’ll keep helpin’ you, but don’t ask me to do somethin’ like that ever again.”

Raditz’s hand fell on Goku’s shoulder with a squeeze of unspoken agreement.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading! I know Goku is a little bit OOC in this story, but that's by design because he's got a bit of Kakarot in him. He's still a precious bean that doesn't want to hurt anybody himself.
> 
> I love comments. Please feed me. Especially the last chapter, cus I've written only three smut scenes in the 500k+ words I've ever published on here, and insecurity is coming in hot! :P
> 
> More Vegebul next time!


	6. Beat on the Brat

A clamor of voices spilled from the gymnasium when Krillin cracked open the door to meet her. 

“You sure you want to do this now, Bulma?”

No, she wasn’t sure. Since the riot, she’d never been less sure of anything. The last five years of her life she spent building the movement, sure she stumbled now and then, but not once had she tripped so hard as to face plant her own confidence. 

“We don’t have a choice. I can’t send them all home without answers.”

“But we don’t have any answers,” Krillin pointed out, shrinking back from her a step as if anticipating a verbal lash to strike him down. Unhelpful as his honesty was, her friend wasn’t wrong. 

Frieza’s impeccable timing destroyed the message she’d been intending to deliver. Not a word for four days, and now, just before she was supposed to reassert confidence in Capsule’s mission to a jam-packed gymnasium, the government flooded the airwaves with its latest decree, placing an indefinite ban on their rights to assembly in matters of state grievances, citing public safety, of all things, as its motive.

She wouldn’t be surprised if they deemed this very gathering a violation of the edict and stormed the school’s hallways in a reenactment of the riot they were here to discuss. 

“Maybe we should postpone,” Yamcha suggested, “until we have a solid message.” 

Bulma’s fingernails dug into her palms. Solid message or not, postponement would only make them appear less competent than going before the group now to address the senseless violence, the deaths, and the plight of their detained members, if only to reassure them they were working to negotiate their extrication.

“Fuck it,” Bulma said under her breath as she pushed open the door. 

The collective voice of the citizens before her swelled uproariously as she crossed to the podium, shouting both at her and amongst themselves in a wall of sound that was, perhaps thankfully, difficult to distinguish individual comments… at least at first. By the time she adjusted the microphone up from the position Krillin left it and the chatter tapered, stray remarks filtered to her ears to remind her that leadership meant absorbing unwarranted punches. She’d hear them, let the jabs land with her chin up, but neither the riot nor the bomb that caused it were hers to take the blame.

“Thank you all for coming. When I planned to speak to you tonight, it was under very different circumstances than what we’ve all just come to learn—that another human right, another promise of the Federation, has been stripped away.”

Not even a sentence in, already their voices piped-up to lament the latest ban, casting blame on her as much as the Feds and Resistance. That was the thing about chaos, nobody was immune to its criticism. Bulma tried to steer the crowd away, chasing the more pertinent point quickly and as loudly as possible, leaning into the mic.

“We are not responsible nor do we deserve to bear the unlawful punishment for an unconscionable act of terror that occurred at a civil march in our name—a bomb that resulted in six civilian casualties and which incited the Federal Forces to unjustifiably attack us with brutal force to arrest nine-hundred and forty-six, injure one-thousand and sixteen, and I am stunned and pained to the core to say, kill twenty-two of our own members. Twenty-eight lives in total were needlessly cut short by reckless violence, and the collateral toll on us—their families, friends, and neighbors—is countless. 

“I know you’re all rightfully angry, and you want answers. We’re working hard to get them. The release of our people that are currently in federal custody is overdue. Forty-eight hours is the legal hold the Feds can detain citizens on charges of public disturbance, as many of us including myself have experienced before. But that time card expired thirty-two hours ago. So far none of our inquiries with the Ministry of Justice have been answered.

“While I understand the pain of not knowing when our loved ones will be released, I urge you to remain patient and civil in order to give us an opportunity to negotiate for their freedom. The only hand we have to play is the continuation of rational thought and rational action in the midst of a government that is seeking any excuse to enforce limitations on our freedom more than they already have for the so-called good of the public. 

“The desire for justice is what drives us. But we must not, in the name of justice, take-up the banner of revenge. I am begging you not to give the Federation a reason to detain our friends and family interminably. The ethos of this community is being tested, and abandoning our values now won’t do anything but provide the Feds with the justification they’re looking for to take away what little liberties we have left.

“Moral clarity is our best weapon against both the tyranny of our government and the anarchy of the Shadow Army. Unlike them, we know the difference between good and evil. Impossible as it might seem to remain standing on the side of goodness, I assure you that we can so long as we stand together.

“Tomorrow night, we will be holding a vigil in honor and remembrance of the twenty-eight souls that were undeservedly stolen. I ask you to please join us at 7pm in Spindletop Park. Anyone that would like to speak before the group can sign-up with ChiChi at the right-side door before you leave tonight.”

The volume of her voice flattened to finally concede the one thing for which most of them had gathered: “I’ll take your questions.” 

Bulma hesitated to open the floor, knowing that the aggregate temperature of the room was barely above freezing, but not giving them the opportunity to air their grievances opposed the very message she’d just sent.

The group before her erupted, and dozens of hands hit the air. Question after question felled the pulpit where she stood like a wide-eyed doe trapped on the highway taking them in. As she scanned the throng of people, at the very back, a familiar shock of blonde hair and black attire caught her attention, though his presence didn’t register beyond the most basic identification in the moment. For the next hour, she was committed to nothing outside of the exhausting back-and-forth of responding to every dubious challenge and desperate plea. 

She’d forgotten about Tarble until the gymnasium’s occupants began to file out the back doors. If he’d been there to watch the train wreck, he didn’t stick around to witness its clean-up. Not that she could blame him. While Tarble was a great actor, the talent didn’t likely extend to feigning comfort and claps on the back for a job that was far from one well done; it didn’t even pass the coals of medium-rare. It was fucking raw, and disappointing, and humiliating not having any real responses that didn’t sound off the extreme ends of the spectrum, from pathetic, stuttering incompetence to gross, political pandering, and nothing in-between. 

Debriefing the event extended long into the night back at the deli, a tired effort that, the longer they discussed, eventually eroded, throwing the same ideas at the wall with indecipherable pitch and a constant loop around to reconsider the same risks and roadblocks. Without the ability for public demonstrations, their movement was effectively stalled. 

Goku was the first to find an excuse to exit the debate, milking his so-called concussion for all it was worth. Once Krillin left to catch his train, ChiChi hammered a hasty gavel to shoo Yamcha and herself out the door. 

Bulma would have been lying if she said she wasn’t relieved. Leadership was heavy cargo. Unfortunately, as much as it weighed her down, the self-inflicted guilt trip of setting it aside, even for a night, was somehow more gruelling. She would skip meals and precious sleep until someone, or enough drinks, demanded she stop. 

Her stomach complained loud enough to twist Yamcha’s eyebrows and earn a chiding remark as he walked her home. “You do know you work at a grocer, right? Where we just left? Shelves of food?”

“I’m fine. I have food at home.”

“But I’ve seen you cook. No offense, but you’re a disaster even when you’re really trying. I’m a little scared to imagine what you eat when you’re desperate.”

“I’m not helpless!” Bulma snapped.

He was sniffing for an invitation, some excuse to come upstairs and play the doting boyfriend he wasn’t. Their relationship was a convenience, not a romance. At least that’s how she saw it, but every now and then, Yamcha would pretend it was something more conventional. She was the asshole, really, because she was never forthcoming about what exactly she wanted. It wasn’t easy to admit to a person, one she cared about personally as much as she valued professionally, that she was simply looking to satisfy a lonely craving every now and then. Instead, she opted to balance his occasional clingy behavior with petulance. Not the most mature method, obviously, but Yamcha’s sensitivity tended to land at the most inopportune moment, when she was tired and stretched passed the point of caring about his feelings.

He seemed intent to prolong tonight’s rejection. Like a stray dog, he jogged behind her up the short stoop to the door. The sconce beside it flickered on its last legs, a dim, yellow glow that was barely bright enough to see the lock.

As Bulma turned back to say goodnight, she found herself suddenly swallowing down a yelp when she spotted a dark figure lounged in the shadow of the brick partition. It was Tarble, asleep it seemed; though it was hard to be sure with his sunglasses on. Bulma kicked his ankle, and his head lolled lazily from its brace against the wall.

“What are you doing here?” 

“Getting a tan. What does it look like?”

“Bulma…” Yamcha warned, likely mistaking the man for some loitering degenerate; he tried to snatch her arm before she could crouch to Tarble’s level, but missed. 

“It’s fine, Yamcha. He just thinks he’s funny.” She pulled the sunglasses down the bridge of Tarble’s nose, her stomach lifting as his dark gaze pinned on her and his lips hooked with a devious smirk. “You ran out of that meeting pretty quick.”

“The liquor store was closing.” He sat up and pulled a tote from behind him where a bottle of wine peeked out from the top. 

“Ah, priorities.” 

She was more than a little surprised that he attended the meeting. But waiting around on her doorstep for hours, buying wine—a rather expensive and inefficient selection for any alcoholic, but especially one like him who didn’t exactly come across as a romantic—were gestures that landed him far outside the bell curve of her expectations. 

Bulma extended her hand, pulling him to his feet. Tarble’s attention traveled over her shoulder toward the man behind her. 

“This is Yamcha. He’s one of our co-founders,” she said by way of a thoroughly awkward introduction that left out the bit about their vague status outside of Capsule, made worse by the miffed expression Yamcha returned at such a reductive description. 

“And, this is Tarble…” she trailed off, unwilling to scramble enough fading neurons together and attempt an explanation as to who or what he was. 

“Call boy. She’s a regular. Tips shit, but she’s got some freaky kinks that make it worth my time,” Tarble deadpanned. 

Fucking hell. Bulma slapped her palms to her face and held them there like a compression pack that could keep the blood from draining to her feet. He was insane. All men were insane when it came to sex, this ritualistic need to flex their pretty feathers in some display of dominance. 

“He _is_ funny…” Yamcha said, his tone dripping with disgust as he shifted his weight to float his feet down the steps. He stopped at the bottom, pursed his lips with a look that was sore and disappointed and completely intent on making Bulma feel like she was more irresponsible than she already felt. “I guess I’ll just let you know tomorrow if we hear from Kami’s people.”

With Yamcha gone, Bulma let the tactless punk inside, scolding him with a hiss between her teeth, “You’re un-fucking-believable.”

Tarble only grinned and tossed his head with a self-satisfied flair that she hated to admit she found attractive. All of his mannerisms were darkly expressive in a way that was magnetizing, almost hypnotic, as if every individual fiber that composed him had been fine-tuned to his control. He was the human equivalent of watching paper burn and curl and trail a twisting tendril of smoke. 

He dropped his tote bag on the kitchen table with a thunk, and from it, extracted not just two bottles of wine, but a box of pasta and jar of sauce. 

“You’re cooking me dinner? Should I be worried?” Bulma lifted an eyebrow, watching him peel the foil from the neck of one of the bottles.

“I think I’m qualified to boil noodles, princess.”

His claim might have come across as credible had he not been glaring at the foil-free top of wine like he’d expected the cork to levitate with his telekinetic powers. 

“Please tell me you’re kidding. You’re a fucking bartender.”

“We don’t serve this!” he whined and shook the bottle at her like it was an equation he lacked the patience to solve. 

“Fine, give.” She didn’t have a corkscrew, but managed to jerry-rig one with a serrated knife that she stabbed into the tops and twisted until they were loose enough to pound straight through the necks of the bottles—an inelegant solution that would likely leave them picking cork from their teeth. 

Table had made himself right at home to pull a pot from its hook above the portable stove and was heating water by the time she poured them each a glass. Bulma lifted the tumbler to cheers to whatever his surprise visit signified. The man wasn’t easy to read, and she half expected to never see him again, much less go out of his way to awkwardly court her. 

“Don’t take this the wrong way, ‘cause in spite of your obnoxious behavior, I enjoy your company. But why are you here?”

Tarble ripped open the box of noodles and dumped them into the bubbling water with a shrug. “Some political satire was playing at the community theater. Unfortunately, it wasn’t as good as the reviews promised, so I thought, why let the evening go to waste entirely? I know a Westside broad that’s down for a good fuck.”

“Is that right? I hate to ruin your party, hotshot, but I’ve been up since dawn, and as soon as I eat this, assuming it’s even edible, I’m going to sleep.”

His brows furrowed as he studied her, as if gauging whether she was serious or playing his favorite game. “Well... this has been fun,” he said, assuming the latter. Tarble swiped a wine bottle from the counter and strode toward the door, pretending to leave. 

“Water’s boiling over,” Bulma droned.

With some skepticism, he glared back over his shoulder, which made it all the more satisfying to watch his face fall slack and beat him at his own little game with the truth. He pivoted back almost at a skip to pull the frothing pot off the stove, but before Bulma could remind him to use a towel, or better yet, just kill the heat, he’d already lifted its cast iron handles. 

“Fuck!” he screamed and dropped it back to the grate. 

Between the cartoonish pitch of his voice and the way he began to pace in a small circle, waving his fingertips in the air as if fanning himself, Bulma found it difficult to hide her sniggering inside her cup. She tried to fix her face into something more sympathetic as she tended to the mess at the stove, but it was impossible with how she found him doubled over with his hands tucked between his legs, breathing and moaning like he’d just been kicked in the nuts. 

Bulma pried the manchild up by the wrists and led him to the sink to stick his fingers under the cold faucet, unable to keep from grinning, much less laughing at him outright. It didn’t help that he scowled at her, looking rather antagonistic from the eyes up, but pitiable and pouty otherwise. 

“I’m glad you’re having fun,” he whined.

“I’m sorry! I don’t mean to laugh,” she said as she did just that. God, he looked so pathetic. She couldn’t help herself from reaching out to pet the back of his head, which made him frown harder, trying to tilt it out of reach. Why was it always men, especially the ones who talked the biggest game that broke down from stubbed toes and papercuts? They called each other pussies as an insult for weakness, but tap any guy in the balls, and he’ll drop to the floor in tears. The burns Tarble sported were mild. They weren’t even worth a blister.

Bulma left him at the sink to nurse his ego while she finished the food, amused as she watched him at the edge of her vision, pulling his digits from the stream every now and then to examine carefully before he gulped down wine like a self-prescribed tonic. He’d had enough alcohol, it appeared, to wean himself off the tap and join her at the table. 

“What’s the prognosis? Are you gonna survive?” 

“So long as I don’t choke on your cooking.”

“I think choking on overcooked noodles says more about you,” Bulma said, a teasing point of fact which Tarble ignored. 

They lapsed into silence as they ate. With the jittery, overstrung state of her mind, conversation felt a bit harder to summon as naturally as their previous, drunken entanglement. Bulma took a self-conscious swig of wine, hoping to tip her buzz, loosen the strange bout of nerves; though the quiet didn’t appear to phase him, concentrated as he was on his plate.

The way he held the fork to perfectly twist a neat, little nest of noodles in every bite was so refined and unlike her own manners or any normal person she’d ever dined with who sawed and scooped them into their mouths, it left her wondering if she was right about her earlier suspicion that he wasn’t who he pretended to be. If he was listed like Goku, then unlike her friend, Tarble had been someone of importance in the monarchical hierarchy, perhaps the offspring of a former lord. While everything else about him screamed otherwise—from the way he dressed and dyed his hair, to the way he drank like a laborman coming down off a twelve hour shift, to his crude vocabulary and drier than a fucking desert sense of humor—there were some habits a person couldn’t bury, perhaps wouldn’t notice in themselves. Even after ten years living as someone else, a thing so simple as how he gripped a fork was a giveaway.

Bulma’s curiosity got the better of her, and finally broke the stale air to ask, “Do you have family here?” 

“Here, why? Do I look foreign?”

“No, I just… first date conversation. I don’t know anything about you.”

An amused smirk swept his face as he homed-in on the bit she hadn’t consciously intended to define. “This is a date?” 

“It’s either that or an awkward follow-up appointment to a one-night stand.” 

As if she was presenting him with a choice, Tarble turned his gaze up at the ceiling, exaggerating an internal debate that was likely weighing which option might lead to sex. It would have been funny had she not found herself wondering if he really did come over with the sole presumption of an easy hookup. 

“You’re doing great, by the way,” Bulma sneered. “Patient compliance is ten out of ten. Completely cured. With any luck, you’ll never have to see me again.”

Perhaps he could manage a trace of sincerity after all, because he dropped his act with an eyeroll and conceded to her original question. “Fine. If you must know, I have a cousin, uncle and aunt. All of them are awful, except maybe her. She cooks.”

“You live with them?”

“Unfortunately,” he grumbled.

“They’re really that bad?”

“No. Just oppressive. Tight quarters. Never being alone gets to you after a while.”

She could understand how Tarble would perceive living with his relatives as oppressive. Hell, after a shift at the deli, especially if it was followed by a long Capsule meeting with the same small team, she felt herself losing her grip on sanity. 

Every nasally wheeze from Krillin on days when his immune system found the air too toxic was particularly irritating when he was trying to mediate an argument; as was every knee-jerk reaction from ChiChi that the girl stubbornly clung to rather than pedal back and admit she’d jumped to a conclusion; and Yamcha’s inability to muzzle his personal feelings, letting his strong stance on debates be entirely dependent on whether or not Bulma indulged his false hopes the night before. Goku was the worst, especially lately. His interruptions that forked-off down a westbound track while the rest of them had been traveling north for ages she could ignore. It was his newfound proclivity to play the devil’s advocate, not just toward her but all of them, that she couldn’t stand. 

Still, the sum total of her friends’ irritants weren’t enough to make their company less desirable than the state of abject loneliness she’d been shouldering for ages.

“Careful what you wish for,” Bulma advised.

“Yeah, no shit.” Both his tone and his mood fell sober. He looked into the bottom of his cup, swirling the remnants of wine inside before he shot it and immediately poured another glass.

“Parents?”

“Gone to the same hell as yours.”

“But you miss them,” she said. 

Tarble’s eyes narrowed, transfixed on the wall behind her to consider what was intended as a commiserating statement like it was a difficult question. 

“The idea of them, maybe. We weren’t close. Hardly an advertisement for normal familial camaraderie,” he responded with a flick of his chin that, as Bulma glanced behind her, pointed to her parents wedding photo. It was the second time in as many nights that the picture caught his attention, which would have been less odd had the conclusion he’d drawn from it not been so strangely perceptive.

“Ah, well they were an anomaly, some symbiotic exercise of fate if you believe in that sort of thing. Grew up together, Uptown actually, near that weird triangular intersection by Banker and Vine Street.” Tarble nodded with recognition. “They were sweethearts since they were kids, carving their names in hearts in wet cement, breaking into abandoned buildings to picnic on the rooftops kind of cliche shit. Eloped the minute she turned eighteen. Passed away within months of each other twenty three years later. He wasn’t even sick. I think he just didn’t know how to exist without her.”

Bulma hated how much she missed them. Even accounting for the rosy tint of hindsight, her family had always been relatively harmonious, absent of much more than the typical, childish tantrums on her part, and the stress of circumstance on theirs. It didn’t make the sentiment of thinking about them any easier, and she could count on one hand the number of times she’d spoken about them with other people, a thought that, as she became aware of it, suddenly pulled her attention from homesick reverie back to the boy across the table.

“Shit, I’m sorry. I just totally made that about me.”

“Fantastic,” Tarble assured as he split the rest of the bottle between their cups like he was preparing for the next act of her personal history to continue without his active participation. 

“No, come on! You aren’t off the hook yet. I haven’t been on many dates before, but I do know this is the part where you tell me how your dysfunctional childhood turned you into an alcoholic nihilist.”

“Flattering assessment, but I think I’ll pass.” 

At his refusal to make himself less of a stranger, Bulma reached across the table and swiped the glass from beneath the wine bottle he’d been shaking free of every precious drop. 

“You were saying?” she teased, a drink hoarded in each hand. 

Stranger or not, he was rather easy to motivate. His glare redirected from her toward the ceiling as he grumbled, “In a nutshell, mommy and daddy were self-absorbed narcissists.”

“Ah, so the nut doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

“Tch, bitch. I brought you dinner.”

“Right. I take it back. You’re so thoughtful,” she mocked, sliding the drink back toward the self-satisfied asshole before she added under her breath, “but it’s not gonna get you laid.”

“Ugh. Still committed to that?”

“Maybe. I could be convinced.” 

“Sounds like extortion,” he said with a droll lift of his eyebrows.

“More like a vetting process, but whatever you need to call it to make yourself feel better.”

Tarble took a generous gulp of wine, an expression of moody defeat falling over his features as he thunked the glass back to the table and said, “I was less a person to them as I was a piece of property. I rarely saw them. She died in childbirth when I was seven. Then he lost his goddamn mind, became obsessed with the kid. A damn shame he didn’t just drop dead with her like your father, instead of taking his sweet time, making all of us miserable for eight fucking years before he got both himself and the only other person he gave a shit about killed by the Icejin army.”

Bulma sat in a spell of shock, long seconds filling the air with silence before she was able to climb back into her head. She wasn’t sure how to respond. The way he’d jumped on the gas from a standstill to recklessly confess his status out loud, regardless of whether she already suspected as much, left her aimlessly stuttering. Only Goku was stupid enough to admit he was listed.

While the government didn’t appear to be pursuant of the remaining names on Frieza’s hit list of loyalists—perhaps in part due to the Acrosian monarchy’s ability to successfully forge identities for what remained of their Saiyan allies—the topic was still one that most citizens, at least the ones she knew, had an unspoken rule not to pry from a person. Information was exploitable, whether as a currency willingly traded or a threat painfully extorted. It was best to remain ignorant.

“Fuck, Tarble. Why did you tell me that? You know I wasn’t trying to dig, right? I mean–”

“Come on, Bulma,” he interrupted. “Did you expect me to make something up? Don’t pretend like you didn’t already know and couldn’t help yourself. It’s fine. The Capsule Corps’ ringleader is probably the last person that would sell me out, right?”

“Of course I wouldn’t! Shit...” Bulma dropped her face in her palms, stiff with embarrassment for her unwitting coercion. It wasn’t what she’d intended, but he should have known better. There was a hell of a lot else he could have shared without giving the game away that he was some lost son of the nobility. “I didn’t think you would actually say it outright. Ugh, I’m sorry…”

“Well, you should be. I feel tricked, utterly used. If only there was a way you could make it up to me,” he said, tapping his finger to his chin, feigning thought.

Fucking hell, he was a lunatic. Bulma dropped whatever guilt-trip she’d been entertaining because, while she didn’t doubt he’d told her the truth, clearly the horny psychopath wasn’t taking it seriously. 

“It’s pretty clear how the dysfunction manifested,” she grumbled. 

Bulma stood to escape to the bathroom, but stopped two steps around the table, pausing her path behind him. She combed her fingers into his hair and yanked his head back. Tarble’s eyes narrowed, looking up at her with the same fervid thrill lit behind them as when she’d bitten him. Damn, he wasn’t going to make this easy. Bulma leaned down, pressed her forehead into his temple and brushed her lips against his ear as she whispered, “Sorry, my lord, or whatever the hell you are, but the only way I’ll be _making it up to you_ is if you beg me.”

“We’ll see,” he muttered before she was out the door.

Compared to the usual standard of intoxication that had her feeling her fingertips along the hallway wall to catch herself in case she stumbled, tonight was mild. It wasn’t alcohol that left her feeling unbalanced. It was him. The tipping point where intrigue fell toward obsession was short and steep, and despite her best efforts, she was barely hanging on. Perhaps the most she could hope for was to kick him over the edge first, a feat that required patience and maybe a few tricks of her own.

The flat was empty when Bulma returned, the night’s breeze nipping through the window he’d left open. But rather than climb eagerly onto the fire escape to join Tarble, she committed to her earlier pronouncement and readied for bed. The trouble was finding an outfit remotely enticing to trigger him. Her wardrobe was rather practical and drab, collected over the years from saver stores and op shops, nothing particularly feminine, especially in the sleepwear department. Maybe it was better to pretend like she wasn’t trying, like she didn’t just spend the past ten minutes digging through broken dresser drawers, she thought, resigning with some frustration to the usual worn out t-shirt. 

Bulma busied about the room, piling dishes in the sink, waiting for the idiot to come inside. If this was a game of chicken, checking on him wasn't defeat as much as a tactic. That’s what she told herself as she poked her head out the window. 

Tarble sat against the building, a bottle of wine between his legs and cigarette burning toward the filter as he took a long drag and stared off at nothing. He looked a bit serious in profile, like perhaps there were more layers to the man than video games and binge drinking and scheming to get his dick wet. Or there weren’t, and he was faking contemplation. 

“Are you done out here? ‘Cause as much fun as this has been, I’m about to call it. I’ve gotta get up in a few hours,” she informed him.

Tarble flicked the cigarette to the ground below before he turned a tired gaze on her and extended the bottle. Maybe he wasn’t acting, or he’d exhausted himself on his own antics, or this was all a part of it, and he was feigning sleepy to drop her guard and let him cozy up in bed. She was pathetic enough to let him.

He scooted over to the window and was about to maneuver a leg through the frame when a sharp crack of gunfire ripped the air and ricocheted through the alley. Bulma’s scream was instantly stifled under his palm that clapped over her mouth as fast as the bullet itself. Tarble had grabbed her whole head between his hands, but neither of them could save the wine bottle that slipped her grasp and shattered on the floor. She felt its contents pooling at her feet as she stared at him, eyes wide and breath panting heavily against his grip. She must have looked as terrified as she felt, because he let go of her slowly, nodding as if to be sure she could contain herself. Bulma wasn’t a stranger to the sound of gunfire. Nobody was. She’d just never heard it this close to home. 

Soundlessly, Tarble shifted from the window’s light to crouch against the building, unblocking her view to the alley below. There was a boy, young, barely a teen. His gait was staggered, but he didn’t let up, kept sprinting down the block before he took his chances to cut down the adjacent street. 

Not a minute later, he was followed by the clomp of heavy boots. Bulma darted out of view, peeking around the edge of the frame to watch two FF soldiers jog past her window with rifles in hand, slowing to a stop at the end of the block. 

“Must’ve nicked him,” said one, pointing the nose of his weapon at the ground in the direction the boy had fled, likely leaving a trail of blood behind to track him. 

Their receding voices, snickering and taunting as they hunted after their prey made her nauseous. Hard as she tried, she felt just as powerless to swallow the sensation as to stop the outcome. That he was a fucking kid made it worse. A runner for the Shadow Army, if she had to guess—it was the most plausible explanation for a person his age to be out in the dead of night, hotly pursued by FF soldiers.

The air around her felt thick and choking as she tried to erase the boy’s awaited fate from her head, but it was hopeless. She couldn’t catch her breath, like a hand had reached down to rip out her heart but got stuck halfway up her throat. The lag—the cold, helpless minutes that passed between now and a conclusion she knew was certain but couldn’t change made it impossible.

The feeling as it escalated tripped her brain into overdrive, a state that was unsustainable for more than a few seconds before a killswitch cut her executive functions. Bulma found herself scrambling through the window after Tarble, desperate to press her ear against another human being’s heartbeat just to hear its steady thunk and hope it could drown out the death knell when the soldiers' weapons finally fired. But pulling herself halfway through the frame, the space where Tarble had hidden on the opposite side was empty—a fact that took far too long to process and left her blinking and spinning her head in every direction. He’d vanished without a sound. 

Every cell in her body reignited with dread, spreading quickly through her veins like wildfire. She paced away from the window to shut off the lights and ran back again. Uncaring that she was barefoot in only a t-shirt and underwear, Bulma climbed out onto the iron planks, craning uselessly over the rails to watch the quiet alley below and hiss his name. 

What the fuck was Tarble thinking? It wasn’t like he was armed, and she knew him well enough to know his ego made him brazenly stupid around the soldiers, like he thought wit could repel bullets. 

She waited outside with chattering teeth and arms hugged around herself for as long as she could possibly stand it. There’d been no movement or noise beyond the rustle of garbage bags, the whole city asleep save for the wind and rats. The cold wasn’t half as bad as the helpless anxiety that had her foraging under the sink for liquor, then pacing the perimeter of the small space, scurrying back to the window with a leap over broken glass and a puddle of wine at every sound she thought she heard. 

It was all so useless. If the idiot wanted to get himself arrested or killed, that was his business. Maybe he hadn’t gone after the boy. She knew it was the alcohol talking, but it was entirely possible that he found an opportunity to escape a wasted, sexless night with her, hop on his bike and show up on another woman’s stoop. Somehow it was mildly comforting to imagine that being worst case scenario. It was sure as hell better than the alternative. It was looking more like the kid evaded the FF. He'd been nicked, but he could still run. Perhaps he got away. 

She finally resigned to busy herself with the mess, dropping a dish towel over the spilled wine to soak up what it could. Though just as she set the ball of her foot against the towel to mop the floor, the unmistakable pop of gunfire, two shots, one after the next froze the extremity to the floor. The blasts were close enough, blocks away, that the odds of them being unrelated were slim to none.

A mindless panic jumped her limbs back into motion. Her heart kicked wild and heavy as if squeezed by a fist, frantically struggling to beat through the pressure as she shot across the room to tug a pair of jeans up her legs, shove her feet into her tennis shoes, and dash out the door. The stairs screeched under her steps in the dark. Light spilled from a neighbor’s unit as he poked his head out to holler some parental reproof that was cut short as the front door snapped behind her.

The cool air felt sharp inside her lungs as she ran. Cutting through the alley, following the boy’s path toward the next block, Bulma didn’t slow down or take time to consider the purpose of chasing the echo of bullets and the soldiers that shot them, or what the fuck she planned to do should she find them laughing and gloating over their kill, or kills if Tarble was noble in both opposing definitions of the word. 

Rounding the corner, she slammed headlong into a dense black wall, a goddamn human cannon that had been flying in the opposite direction. The force knocked her flat against the pavement with her assailant landing heavily on top. Bulma heaved to catch her wind and reorient her jumbled vision. As his weight lifted from her chest, a rush of fresh air inside her lungs refilled enough senses to recognize the gritty voice chuckling in pain above her. 

“One hell of a hit, princess,” Tarble moaned. He sat back on his knees, hunched over with an arm wrapped around his ribcage, grimacing as if he’d broken one. 

Bulma pressed up from the turf and knelt before him. When their eyes locked, a dark smile spread over his pretty, white teeth that was almost sinister, as if he knew he’d been caught and there wasn’t any point in resuming the role of some happenstance love interest left pained and wheezing from a blow she hadn’t delivered. Her thoughts bounced untethered inside her skull as she stared back, but unable to descramble them into coherent words, instead Bulma packed them into the palm of her hand and slapped him. 

Tarble didn’t seem surprised. His chin barely flinched, and he said nothing. The baleful expression that remained clouded over his features confirmed everything she needed to know: he was one of them. 

Of course he was. She suspected it the first night, but ignored her own good instinct. Despite seeing through an act he presumed was iron clad, she'd been in denial and went along with it because she was fucking recklessly lonesome, always but especially after her reputation nosedived thanks to a riot the Resistance purposely curated. A corny pick-up from the average stranger at the arcade would have been enough to suffer an invitation back to her flat to forget about it for a few hours, and Tarble was anything but average. He was more interesting than a car crash. She couldn't have looked away if she'd wanted to. And nothing he'd said besides his name and political affiliation was likely untrue. 

She had to hand it to the Shadows—the soldier they picked to make her a patsy would have been perfect for the job if only his soft spot for the children they recruited hadn't exposed him. Whatever his mission was—to demote her further in the eyes of her own organization, to expose her for being twenty-five and vulnerable to the same shitty personal hangups as every other person on Planet Earth—he failed. He couldn't smear her unless he was willing to unmask himself.

Clamoring to her feet, Bulma stormed off in the direction of her flat, quickly, before the disillusionment that welled-up angrily inside her chest emerged as some overemotional display he didn’t deserve to witness. 

“Come on, Bulma. Would you rather that I left the kid to die?” he called at her back.

The question, far from being beside the point, was selfishly intended to lapse his lies to make her feel guilty—some fallacy of logic where she ought to forgive the deception and laude him as some kind of vigilante hero, and absent of that, insinuate she’d rather have remained blissfully unaware and let the boy be shot. While Bulma might have been stupid enough not to sense Tarble’s scheme when it started, thankfully now, he wasn’t stupid enough to follow her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know this story has a lot of moving parts and the characters have a lot of identities/layers/motives that are tough to keep up with, Vegeta especially. Just to avoid confusion, he told her willingly that he was a former Saiyan nobleman, which is a no-no, because that means he's just made her vulnerable to being exploited by the FF as much as risking his own discovery as a person on Frieza's hit list. Of course, Vegeta isn't scared of being hunted. And when he saves the runner, she realizes he's also a soldier in the Shadow Army. Most listed persons are also soldiers of the Resistance, but in no way does she suspect he's the ghost prince... 
> 
> My beta Blackswans22 alerted me to the fact that this story is fucking confusing, so much that I want to solicit an artist to draw a Game of Thrones style map to explain who is fighting who. Any artists out there who get a kick out of cartography, hit me up plz!!
> 
> Comments are most appreciated! :D


	7. Lost in the Supermarket

A cardboard box landed beside Bulma with a thud too quiet for its size, given that she could comfortably curl up inside of it and nap through the rest of her shift. Not having slept for a day and a half was unpleasant enough without adding to it the fact that she’d been duped by a resistance member. Though to what end, she’d yet to figure out. A long con, perhaps. Tarble, just like he’d claimed, didn’t seem interested in Capsule much less their country’s political climate, and instead, was rather quick to divert any conversation that approached such topics. It didn’t mean he was without an agenda. 

She should have gone with her first instinct when she suspected he knew who she was or wondered if he was a serial killer, because she was pretty damn close to right on both counts. Tarble was technically murderous. Unfortunately, Bulma Briefs was an idiot that could be suckered by a cocksure smile, dark, penetrating eyes and cheekbones that looked like they’d been chiseled out of marble. 

“You feelin’ okay?” asked Goku, who knelt down beside her to cut open the box and unload the toilet paper inside of it onto the shelf. “You look a little…” he trailed off with a nervous grin, as if unsure whether a comment on her tired appearance would draw fire. Far more irritating was the way all the men around her, save for the one man she wanted to forget, seemed to tiptoe on eggshells with a skittish fear of crunching a nerve, like her psyche was that fucking fragile, and she was one misplaced word away from snapping sanity.

“Didn’t get much sleep,” Bulma offered as explanation, not interested in confiding in anyone, Goku in particular, about her mistake with the Shadow Army soldier. 

She continued to sticker products in silence until, from the dinging shop door, Yamcha entered the deli with an enviable energy and a smile strapped to his face that demanded their attention. He let the suspense build, waiting for ChiChi to power off the meat slicer and venture from behind the counter. 

“Kami’s in,” he announced with a clap. “Co-sponsor, speaker, anything we want. He’s willing to take the risk so long as his people can run PR. They want control over the messaging, frame it as some educational convention to improve our chances of sailing straight through a loophole and avoid the FF shutting it down.”

A squeal from ChiChi, who skipped to leap on their messenger, and Goku’s hand that excitedly shook Bulma’s shoulder pulled her from her sour mood. Finally, they had a grapple to cling to, a solid hook to regain their footing. If anyone could convince the masses to come together in spite of the ordinance and reinvigorate the collective spirit of their movement, it was Kami. His popularity as the presidential candidate had been unfathomable, drawing even the most complacent citizens to wait in long lines to exercise their newly founded right to vote. 

The antithesis of Frieza, who campaigned on consequential fear, a promise that anyone outside of himself would become an apocalyptic failure—Kami campaigned on hope. Though his rhetoric could be a bit fantastic, promising a world that wasn’t his to give, he had the necessary qualities to lead a populace that had zero experience in self-governance: a calm, stabilizing presence that was fatherly, almost godlike. It was as if Kami had existed for a hundred lifetimes, enough to see humanity trip over itself again and again, and finally came down from the clouds to offer guidance. He was a pair of training wheels that could prop up their bicycles until they were confident enough to autonomously pedal themselves.

The fracture among the Capsule Corps was growing every day their members remained in the Federal Forces' custody. The Ministry of Justice, the authority that held them could stay silent, but Capsule wasn’t given such leniency. According to Yamcha, sentiment was shifting from being helplessly hopeful in Capsule’s ability to negotiate with the Feds and bring them home to hopelessly desperate. The more dauntless, able-bodied members among them were beginning to pass notes to track down an infamous friend of a friend that could induct them into the Shadow Army’s ranks.

With Kami, Capsule stood a fighting chance to prevent the kind of violent, anarchistic chaos the Shadow Army was hell bent to deliver. 

“Bulma, aren’t you happy?” ChiChi asked. 

Unaware that she didn’t appear as such, Bulma forced a smile that was more befitting of the news. “Of course I am. Ecstatic. Seriously.” 

“She didn’t sleep good is all,” Goku said, overcompensating for his guilty conscience with a sympathetic pat on her head like she was a sick child in need of consoling. 

Yamcha let a hollow laugh of disagreement and muttered not so subtly under his breath, “No pity here.” 

“Why?” ChiChi inquired. As the girl turned a suspicious look between her and Yamcha, Bulma felt a wince of discomfort and embarrassment bloom across her cheeks like some gullible moron who’d just been fleeced of their fortune. The last thing she needed was the others learning of her drunken misadventure, least of all with a Shadow Army soldier. But ChiChi was nothing if not perceptive on such gossipy topics as jilted lovers. Her mouth rounded as she translated the resentment in the room, “Ooh, the blonde from the arcade? Again?” 

“That’s where you picked that guy up? Glad to hear your no-show with the Shadow Army wasn’t a total waste of your time.” Yamcha tossed his head back, sniggering at the ceiling as though he found her pivot from a failed experiment in diplomacy to a boozy hookup laughable and completely unsurprising. 

It was a little unfair. While she did have a penchant to vent her frustrations through the end of a liquor bottle, she could count on two hands the number of men she’d wound up in bed with because of it. That included Tarble, who by all logic shouldn’t be counted thanks to his advantageous ploy to get her drunk and seduce her. She was hardly at fault.

“They didn’t send someone?” asked Goku.

“Nope. So I got a little drunk, brought a random guy home, saw him again last night. But as it turns out, he’s kind of an asshole. So now that you’re all caught up on my love life, can we move on?”

“Hell no! Bulma, you can’t serve the asshole line without dishing-up the juicy details,” ChiChi lamented.

To prove otherwise, Bulma pressed her lips together and pulled the toilet paper rolls Goku had prematurely stocked on the shelves to to sticker them with prices, ignoring the gossip mongers who carried on the conversation without her.

“Dude was a cocky, little punk. Looks like a wannabe member of The Clash.”

Yamcha’s description prompted Goku’s brows to pucker in her periphery, and he turned to Bulma to ask, “What’s his name?”

Maybe she was reading into it, but something in her friend’s tone felt like more than innocent curiosity. If Goku was fraternizing with the enemy, as she suspected, it was a dumb question that would backfire if he did know Tarble. He was a terrible liar. And she didn’t have the headspace to watch him fail to bury his recognition if it existed. Putting Goku on the spot was on the agenda, just not today’s.

“Doesn’t matter. Change of topic, please,” Bulma begged.

Yamcha thankfully obliged with a snap of his fingers as some alternative headline popped into his head. “You hear two FF patrols were killed a few blocks from your apartment? No House Vegeta calling cards. But who else would’ve done it? Probably just ran out of spray paint.”

* * *

Vegeta uncapped another beer, hoping enough of them could distract from his itchy scalp and dizzying fumes. The miserable process alone called for retribution. Maybe he wouldn’t kill Frieza immediately; maybe he'd torture him instead, make him soak in a tub of peroxide until he was begging for a bullet. 

It didn’t help his mood the way Fasha was pressing her thumbs against the colorful bruise on his ribcage. She looked rather amused to elicit a hiss. 

“Nothing seems broken. You’re both very lucky.” 

She’d tended to the boy’s injuries early in the morning. A surface wound, she said. The bullet sliced his thigh, but it was nothing a few stitches couldn’t fix.

“It’s not luck, Fash. I know toddlers with better aim,” Vegeta chided.

He pulled down his shirt and leaned against the fridge, watching the small woman’s attention return to the stove. He never understood how she could stand to cook while bleaching his hair in the same room. The fumes always left him lightheaded and without a sense of smell or taste for hours. 

“Well, then Cabba is lucky. Six million people in this city. He takes a bullet in the dead of night, and you of all people come to his rescue. It’s providence.”

“It’s coincidence.” 

“Semantics,” she scoffed. 

Vegeta suspected the woman was about to run off with the same old sermon she was prone to deliver in good times and bad, always relying on the delusion of a higher power to make sense of people’s decisions and restore order to a dark, chaotic world. She never could accept the simple fact that the human race was doomed by its own insatiable greed and lust for power. And by the same token, she attributed every win to the same irrational dogma. It wasn’t tireless planning, training, hard earned skill, or ingenuity. Just some damnable divine intervention… luck, fate, providence. Sparing him a tiresome monologue, instead she wagged her head and chuckled to herself as she fluffed a pot of rice. 

“The hell is so funny?”

Fasha glanced at him sideways with a peculiar smile. “He doesn’t remind you of anyone?”

“Who?”

“Cabba.”

“No,” he snapped, quick and tetchy. The comparison was obvious. Cabba didn’t only resemble Tarble, he had an eerily similar temperament—a mild-mannered innocence that the kid constantly tried to disprove, specifically around Vegeta. The runner was a leech that grabbed hold and had to be physically detached from his elbow whenever they were in the same vicinity.

“Ah, be nice,” Fasha scolded. “He idolizes you.”

“I took a buttstock to the chest for him, so he damn well better be grateful.” 

“I just think that if you’re going to enlist these boys, perhaps you should mentor them so they don’t make mistakes that’ll get them killed,” she suggested. At the same time, she swiped the kitchen timer from the counter and cranked the dial to chime, cleverly inserting her two cents without having to pay to hear his rebuttal.

Even if Vegeta could come up with one, Fasha was right. Had he spent time training the damn runners, maybe he wouldn’t have been forced to compromise his cover, not that it was particularly ironclad. 

With his head bent under the faucet, watching lavender-tinted rivulets drain from the tips of his hair, he recounted all the ways he’d blundered the deception, managing to turn a primeval strength into an achilles heel in a matter of hours. Not only did he tell the woman that he was a listed noble, but he described how each of his family members met their demise, then rounded out an inadvisable game of truth or dare by adding a few FF heads to his mantle. The hell was wrong with him? It was like some exercise in self-sabotage.

The front door rattled open and Nappa plodded inside, clearing the phlegm at the back of his throat in lieu of a greeting. 

“Good timing. Dinner’s ready,” said Fasha, dropping a towel on Vegeta’s head. “Where’s Raditz?”

“Good question. Where is Raditz, Vegeta?” was Nappa’s salty retort. 

Vegeta shrugged. Guessing Raditz’s whereabouts sounded about as fun as putting up with the moron in person. 

Nappa scraped a chair from beneath the table, which groaned under his weight as he sat down. Vegeta hoped its legs would finally collapse, because watching Nappa try to heft himself from the linoleum would be far more entertaining than listening to his complaints. Regrettably, the chair survived another assault by the man’s fat ass.

“He’s covering your shift at the bar, like he did the other night,” Nappa answered his own question. 

Vegeta retrieved more beer from the fridge and extended a bottle toward him, not so much as a peace offering as it was to prevent the man from busting his balls over his drinking habits too. 

Despite that Vegeta was no longer a child, Nappa still thought of himself as an extension of the late king, bestowed with the honor of grooming the heir to the throne—a glorified nanny, in essence. It didn’t help that in this world, on paper he was both Vegeta’s uncle and employer, an arrangement to protect his identity that, when they were alone, bloated the man’s head.

“Sorry daddy, slipped my mind. I was already working.” 

“Working? You trying to tell me that sleeping with the Capsule broad is some kind of strategy?” 

“It is,” Vegeta asserted, trying not to show his surprise that Nappa learned of his rendezvous with Bulma Briefs. Eighteen was the only person he’d told, and he was a little irritated that she hadn’t kept the information to herself. 

“Care to enlighten me?” Nappa’s expression was patronizing, as if questioning a delinquent teen, and he sat back waiting with his arms folded against his chest. 

Fasha dropped a plate of rice and baked chicken in front of him with a thud that said she disapproved of her husband’s ill-mannered interrogation. Living in squalor did nothing to loosen the woman’s strangle hold on propriety. If she thought Nappa cuffing a low-life like Raditz upside the head in her presence was ignoble, reprimanding the crowned prince was treasonous. Funny, considering the woman failed to have a problem issuing her own cute little advisements. 

Nappa obliged his wife through an eyeroll and shifted his tone. “Look I mean no disrespect. I get that you’ve been obsessed with this girl for years, ever since she came on your radar. I’m just worried that what you meant to do was meet with her and feel her out, but you got drunk, and your wires got crossed, and ya ended up feeling her up instead.”

“You act like you’ve forgotten who I am,” Vegeta spat, despite that the man’s assessment of the situation was annoyingly accurate. 

When he’d gone to meet Bulma at the arcade, he didn’t have a plan beyond basic reconnaissance; a task that seemed easy enough, he thought he could wing it. He didn’t know what the woman was like in person, only her rhetoric, and based on that, he assumed he’d hate her. Maybe he would have slept with her anyway for the hell of it, some bit of trivia by which he could entertain himself. But she wasn’t the girl he’d expected.

Far from a boorish, two-dimensional idealist, Bulma was a goddamn mess, from her frizzy hair to her quick-triggered mood swings. It was a wonder how she managed to organize an entire political movement. The woman appeared incapable of tying her shoelaces. Yet there was something in her lack of self-restraint that was endlessly fascinating. She was as confident as she was vulnerable, a dichotomy that he understood too well but had never witnessed a person so whole-heartedly embrace. Being good in bed was just a bonus.

Gods, he was losing his mind. Nappa was right, his wires were dangerously twisted, spitting sparks in a pretty, iridescent blue, distracting him from the one thing he spent the past decade preparing for. 

If he was being honest, the root rot in his decaying motivation, which was becoming more apparent with each encroaching day, had nothing to do with Bulma Briefs. As Frieza’s inauguration loomed, instead of an anticipatory thrill ten years in the making was a feeling more akin to dread. 

He still wanted to kill him, look him in the eyes and make it hurt. That hadn’t changed; it was only the aftermath. The Shadow Army’s success would be a justified yet ultimately dissatisfying conclusion because the outcome they all expected to come from it wasn’t one he was prepared to deliver anymore, assuming he ever really had been. Perhaps Prince Vegeta’s wounds were as mortal as they were self-inflicted.

“I know who you are more than you know yourself. You’ve been feeding his ghost so long, you don’t know how to stop it from eating you alive. So you distract yourself with too much drinking and thinking with that thing between your legs instead of your head. Or maybe it’s all that shit in your hair that’s poisoning your mind and making you stupid.”

Low fucking blow. Vegeta wasn’t the one who came up with that insipid detail for his forged identity. He was about to say as much, but Fasha beat him to it, whacking her husband at the back of his head. 

“Leave him be!”

“Yes, listen to mommy. I have it under control.”

“I’m begging you, Vegeta. You’ve gotta end it. Kakarot is on board. He knows this girl. Let him flip her.”

“I wouldn’t trust that moron to flip a pancake. I can turn her myself.” 

Nappa’s assumption that he meant to magic-dick Capsule Corps to their side, while it hadn’t been his intention, as a fix, it wasn’t half bad. Quite brilliant, Vegeta realized. As he chugged the rest of his beer, the idea drew voltage, exciting the meters in his head. He knew full well the incentive had far more to do with selfish obsession than big picture strategy; two birds one stone, the motive hardly mattered at this stage. 

Vegeta was halfway out the door when Nappa opened his mouth again to walk back his small, inspiring contribution with more reproving commentary.

“Distro meeting is tomorrow, 10am sharp. Don’t let it slip your mind.”

“No... Tomorrow’s the seventh. Move it.”

The way Nappa paused, it was hard to tell whether it was out of frustration or pity. Though the soft, careful whine in his voice once he found it again suggested both. “Why are you still doing this? When we’re so close to–”

“I said fucking move it!” Vegeta snarled at him to shut up. He let most of Nappa's insubordinate advice land because the man was trustworthy, experienced, and so far, had kept Vegeta alive and anonymous for ten years under Frieza's nose. Their dynamic was certainly complicated, enough that Nappa was quite comfortable speaking his mind, depending on the company, but not so much that he'd dare test Vegeta on this point.

Nappa’s jaw twitched as he bit his tongue in subservience, even if the consequence meant delaying a discussion on how to distribute the weapons they’d commandeered to their soldiers, weapons which were dangerously stockpiled in a single warehouse on the city’s outer limits. Undoubtedly, the FF were looking for them. If they discovered the whole stash, the jig would be up, game fucking over. Instead of revolution, Frieza’s inauguration would kickstart the dictatorship he’d spent a decade preparing to deploy. He'd bring Saiya's citizens to their knees with Acrosia waiting in his crosshairs. Nappa was right, of course, not just about the girl, but about the ghost Vegeta allowed to consume him, swallow-up every rational thought until there was nothing left hanging on his bones but guilty impulses and blind vengeance. 

“Wednesday, first thing,” Vegeta did his best to reassure him. 

“Fine,” Nappa conceded, though it was hard to miss the doubt that reigned over his features.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Drop me comments, questions, theories, debates, hugs. Anything! xoxox


	8. Personality Crisis

With the lunch crowd come and gone, the deli was in its usual afternoon lull, leaving Bulma to run out the clock on her shift, wandering the aisles to reorganize products indecisive shoppers had been too lazy to return to their proper shelves. 

The candy aisle was forgivably the worst, given the combination of its clientele’s grand ambitions and minature attention spans. Bulma was crouched separating Salted Nut Rolls from the Rally bars on the bottom shelf when the bell clanged angrily from the front door being opened with too much force. She hopped-up to peer around the rack with a split-second hope that Goku had come early to relieve her—a hope that wasn’t just dashed, but stomped on, ground into the deli’s cracked tiles by a pair of well-worn combat boots. 

Her heart raced as she stood frozen behind the colorful wrappers. If he hadn’t spotted her, maybe he’d leave… or maybe he’d wait around until someone arrived that he could ask about her. That meant ChiChi, who’d slipped upstairs to deliver lunch to her father. Letting Tarble talk to a person as nosy as that teenage gossipmonger was far worse than confronting the man herself.

Bulma refitted her composure with a deep, modulating breath before she stepped around the corner. “The hell are you doing here?” she spat.

Tarble pivoted to face her, a smirk on his lips which were undoubtedly prepped with a joke. But hearing ChiChi’s feet galloping down the stairs, Bulma didn’t risk waiting around for the punchline. She charged toward him, grabbed Tarble by the sleeve of his leather jacket, and dragged him out the back door into the alley. 

“Your customer service skills need work, princess,” he quipped. 

“Shut the hell up! What do you want?” 

His mouth opened and closed with a grin, playing fool to the contradiction in her demand. Fucking smartass. It was a bit unbelievable. He’d come all this way to explain himself, she assumed, yet couldn’t manage to cage his funny ego now that she was standing in front of him. While she felt a strong desire to know what he had to say, she couldn’t allow him to dictate the terms through his quirky little game, pretending as if she’d physically yanked out his larnax as he mimed an incapacity for speech.

“For fuck’s sake. I don’t have time for this,” Bulma growled. Scuffing her foot against the pavement, whipping her hair behind her, she pivoted toward the door. The dramatics paid off. Tarble quickly latched onto her arm and pulled her back to face him. But far from the apologetic expression she deserved, she was surprised to find his features had hardened. It wasn’t Tarble looking at her, nor the lost, little lordling she entertained at dinner. This man had the discernible aura of the killer that person had become after The Fall. Vengeance clouded his dark eyes like a desert storm; he couldn’t see past it. 

“Climb down from your moral high ground, Bulma,” he sneered. “Whose side are you on? Kid’s thirteen, and you’re mad about a couple of FF?” 

He was being purposefully obtuse, circumventing the larger issue to focus instead on a decision he could easily desaturate, cherry pick a moral she couldn’t refuse to make himself a hero. The organization he was a part of exploited children as carrier pigeons, so he was damn well obligated to help the kid. But that wasn’t the point. 

“I’m upset because you lied to me!” 

“Omission. We’re not advertising. That’s how it works. I would’ve told you eventually.” 

“Eventually? Bullshit! This is some twisted game. You guys fucked us. And I reached out, thinking honest communication would help us both to rectify the situation, but instead, you tricked me into sleeping with you! Why?” 

The accusation, real or not, didn’t sit well with him. Tarble’s knack for theatrics took the form of spurious outrage. His eyes were so narrowed, he could cut them on the edges of his pretty cheekbones. 

“What the hell are you talking about? I didn’t trick you! All I did was buy a girl a drink. You were the one who stole my keys, dragged me to your apartment, and unzipped my fucking pants.”

“Cut the shit. You knew who I was before you bellied up to the bar. Honestly, I could care less about sleeping with you. At least that part was entertaining. I just want to know why when I asked for a meeting, I got you instead, two hours late, hitting on me, buying me those drinks? Why not just talk to me straight? Was it some ego thing? You’d rather try to humiliate me than dignify speaking to me? It doesn’t make any fucking sense.”

“What paranoid planet are you living on? I don’t know anything about a meeting,” he insisted, the last bit straining his voice with a hint of desperation. 

She had to hand it to him; he was a wonderful actor. His commitment to the role was as impressive as it was infuriating. The way he dragged his palm down his face and looked off down the alley with the sorrowful guise of a jilted lover trying to scramble together one last ditch plea to stop an impending separation—even if sincere, the proportion was ridiculous considering they’d just met four days ago. When he looked at her again, he spoke with the same frustrated tone, only calmer. 

“What I told you the other night, nobody else knows. Besides my family, who’s not really my family, but you know that too. I would have told you this at some point. But it isn’t just about me. I don’t know what kind of pull you think I have, but I’m sorry to tell you, I’m just a fucking foot soldier. Our hierarchy isn’t as transparent as yours. I don’t know who’s running the show. I don’t know what their plan is. My orders are delivered by runners like that kid, and I follow through. That’s it. And as easy as _‘Make the Capsule chick eat shit at Dragon Ball’_ would’ve been as a directive, it wasn’t one. I swear to fucking god, I just thought you were, you know…” he flapped a hand at her, avoiding her eyes as he struggled to spit out the word, “pretty.”

His painfully awkward flattery, while endearing, was less convincing than the reminder he’d told her of his listed status. She hadn’t consciously forgotten, but it was a puzzle piece too ill-fitted to the larger narrative that she’d let it escape. Nothing fit besides the version of events he was telling her now. At the same time, that version felt off like a betrayal of instinct. 

“Just come with me,” he said. His hand reached out, but his fingers barely brushed her forearm before he retracted them, looking preemptively rejected. 

“Go with you where? I can’t. I’m working.”

Technically, that excuse was valid for another forty-five minutes. But even if it wasn’t, trusting him felt out of scope, not because he was objectively dangerous, but because he was dangerously charming. His lips pressing together, pouty and pleading, were enough to tempt her to concede to anything he wanted. She was about to give in, until she heard the back door squeak open behind her and witnessed a smarmy mask steal his face faster than a clapboard could signal his scene to action.

“Well, hi there,” said ChiChi as she hefted a garbage bag into the bin. 

“Hellooo,” Tarble cooed.

“What are you guys doing out here?” ChiChi shrugged her eyebrows in some cute, curious amusement as she wandered over. 

“He was just–”

“Begging Bulma to play hooky, but her boss is a hard ass... so she claims.”

ChiChi’s eyes nearly popped from her skull. She turned to Bulma, her hand laid across her chest in a show of pretend pain that left Bulma looking between the two, wondering how she’d suddenly become the star of some avant garde performance. 

“I’m certain the hard ass won’t mind if you leave, Bulma. It’s dead in there.”

“Excellent,” said Tarble. With an impish friendliness, he extended a hand for ChiChi to shake. “Bitch boss I take it?”

“Arcade asshole,” ChiChi concluded with an accusing point of her finger that had Tarble mouthing a silent ‘ouch’ with his palm laid over his heart. Not even ChiChi was immune to his devious charm. She laughed, and her head tipped sideways, nixing subtlety as she scanned him up and down. “Have we met? You look really familiar.”

“Doubt it. I would have remembered you.” The philandering punk had the gall to wink, a small, yet loaded action that curdled Bulma’s blood inside her skull. 

Before she could stop herself, she snapped, “You’re fucking unbelievable!”

It was exactly what he wanted, of course—to spark a jealous fuse then sit back and fan his pretty face with the same satisfaction he probably got from watching flames lick around an FF humvee while soldiers burned to death inside.

The reaction drew ChiChi’s eyes into a perfunctory roll. “Don’t take any diggs from this one too personally. She hasn’t slept in four years.” 

“Okay, time to go,” Bulma interrupted. Sensing that this commiserating roast, criticizing her in the third-person, could go on for another four years, she dragged Tarble back through the store by the wrist to collect her jacket and escorted the smirking asshole out the front door. 

She followed him down the sidewalk in silence, arms sullenly crossed. Just because he schmoozed his way into a date didn’t mean she had to put on an equal show of enthusiasm. 

His bike was parked around the corner. Tarble unthreaded a helmet from the handlebar, pulled his keys from his pocket, and extended them both toward her. 

“I’m driving?” 

“Only if you want to.”

Hell yes, she did; though unwilling to showcase her excitement, she quickly stuffed her face inside the helmet and leisurely swung a leg over the saddle. Tarble climbed on behind her. The small bike left them tightly squeezed together, knee to knee, and as she fired the engine, his hands found hold on her hips. The last time she was straddled between his legs seared her memory like a hot flash that made for a risky bet as to whether or not she’d pass out before the engine could idle to an even purr and allow them to take off. 

“Head uptown,” he directed, his voice rumbling like an extension of the machine beneath them. It was easier said than done to turn the bike around from a standstill, especially with two people astride it. Tarble dragged his foot along the pavement to rebalance and keep them from toppling over, his deep tones carping against her ear, “Try not to kill me, woman.”

Bulma put their wobbly start out of her mind and headed for the parkway that traced an unswerving path along the river bank. Fewer traffic lights, higher speeds, and pleasant scenery made for a far more enjoyable ride than the stop-and-go of the city’s grid. Once she could open up the throttle, the noise of the world passed by with a hum. She'd forgotten how easily stress could all fall away at sixty miles per hour. Driving felt more restorative than the few pathetic hours she managed to sleep each night. 

She was only reminded of Tarble’s presence when he tapped her thigh to signal their exit. They reentered the busy matrix, traversing the city blocks at his direction. Hardly familiar with the capital’s Uptown District, much less their destination if he had one in mind, Bulma followed his cues. 

The further they rode from the loud, concrete parkway, the nicer the neighborhoods became. They passed down historical streets lined with stately, brownstone row houses, each guarded by ornamental iron fences, and blocks composed of modern condominiums whose brick facades and white pillared entrances were designed to appear as if they’d been there all along. 

As they pulled up to an intersection, Tarble shouted against her ear to park somewhere along the block. He hopped off the bike before the light changed. Bulma couldn’t help but be annoyed that he didn’t trust her to maneuver it with him on the back until she realized every car that was parked along the curb was worth more than her life. She cut the engine and carefully walked the motorcycle back to fit between them, wondering what the hell they were doing in some affluent, residential neighborhood. It couldn’t possibly be where he lived. 

Tarble was waiting on the sidewalk lighting a cigarette when she hopped up to meet him. Without a word, he started toward a shady little street where uniformly planted trees stretched their arms from either side to canopy the road. It was nothing like the post-apocalyptic concrete of the west bank. 

Bulma strolled beside him in silence, not for lack of conversation as much as conscious intrigue, letting him take the lead without interference. It wasn’t easy. Relinquishing control, refraining from questions went against her very nature, but at the same time, trusting him meant stepping back and giving him a blank check to cash his intentions. Unlike Tarble, she had none. If he hadn’t dropped by the shop, if she never saw him again, there’d be no love lost between them, just a temporary bitterness she’d get over from a personal perspective by the end of the week; though undoubtedly, it would hold permanence as far as the organization he worked for was concerned—not that the animosity between the Shadow Army and the Capsule Corps didn’t exist already. 

While their organizations held tenuously similar objectives and collaboration would perhaps prove to be a necessary evil—especially now that the government was purposefully framing them as being one in the same as it walked back the freedoms promised through Capsule’s initiatives—there wouldn’t be any coaction if the Resistance wasn’t willing to come by it honestly. Tarble certainly wasn’t a good faith ambassador on their behalf. But he was committed, it seemed, to advocate his own.

The sky was bright once they’d left the shade of the trees to cross down an adjacent street. Children’s squeals floated from a park that stretched the length of the block. It was beautiful. Uniformly cut grass as green as astroturf blanketed the surface where kids played, and their mothers sat on benches or pushed strollers along criss-crossing pathways. Despite the season’s dropping temperatures, round flower beds still bloomed with color at the bases of young trees, and landscapers were put to work trimming hedges that ran along the inside of an iron fence at the park’s perimeter. At the center sat a three tiered fountain where water cascaded from each basin into a surrounding pool. As she strolled along the sidewalk, Bulma was struck with a familiar feeling that she’d been there before. 

Tarble, who seemed disinterested in the scenery, was trekking a few yards ahead. Bulma tugged at his sleeve once she caught up to him. 

“Are you keeping a schedule, or can we check out the park?” His brows twisted above a dubious smile like she said something funny. “Come on. A little dose of nature won’t tarnish this whole gutter punk thing you’ve got going on,” she teased with a wave of her hand at his attire.

“You’re right about that, princess. Jumping the fence of a private park in broad daylight is quintessentially punk.”

“What do you mean it’s private? How? For who?”

“Look around you,” Tarble said. She followed the spin of his gaze—from the park to the perfectly paved streets and fancy cars, to the brand new condos, where she realized that inscribed above their grand entryways were Icejin characters. “Westside hoodrat doesn’t get out much, I take it?”

“Not up here, clearly.” 

While the city had been changing for a decade under the Federation, it was always spun with positive propaganda, hailed under the banner of improvement, refurbishment, clean-up. It was class displacement, and it wasn’t shocking news. Even the old monarchy was guilty of allowing private developers to level tenements and turn them into luxury condos, a slow shouldering of the proletariat west of the river’s bend. Unlike her parents, she grew up in the Western District for that very reason and didn’t often cross the river. But this felt different; locking parks behind fences where admittance required an Icejin national passport was more than just cruel economics. The Federation was doing the very thing they promised they wouldn’t: turning Saiya’s people into second-class citizens of their own home. 

“Fuck ‘em. Come on.” He closed his hand around hers, and with a yank he pulled her stubborn feet from where they’d planted at the park’s edge toward a narrow side street that strayed from the block’s tidy grid to cut at an odd angle down the center. It was reminiscent of the street her parents grew up on, just nicer and with far more animosity from its residents who scrutinized them from their balconies as they passed below. 

Her mind wasn’t fully present when Tarble stopped. She waited absently for him to light a cigarette, tie a boot, whatever it was until he pulled her along again. But his feet didn’t move, only his shoulder as he nudged her attention. Long seconds passed before she registered what she was looking at. Maybe it was the altered surroundings that threw her off, or the fact that she was used to seeing the structure in a black and white photograph, but once it clicked she dropped his hand and raced up the church’s steps. It’s arching double doors were painted a bright red that popped against its facade of earthy, mismatched stonework. It was striking in a way the old photo couldn’t possibly capture.

“You went looking for this?” she asked, to nobody apparently because he was still standing on the sidewalk when she spun around, like he feared the hand of god might reach down from the clouds to smite his heathen head off his neck. Cautiously, Tarble treaded up the steps. 

“I was in the neighborhood this morning. Wasn’t hard to find.”

“You were in _this_ neighborhood? In the morning? You don’t strike me as an early bird, much less a church goer.”

He smiled wryly. “Well, if we’re getting technical, I was still awake and bored.”

“All-nighter… Shocking,” Bulma chided as she yanked a curved, brass handle. It was locked tight. “Don’t tell me churches are private now too?” 

Tarble tore a piece of paper that she failed to see had been tacked to the bulletin next to the entrance and held it toward her. Even if she’d spotted it, she couldn’t read the language.

“What is it?”

“Demolition notice.”

“They’re tearing it down? Why?” 

Tarble only stared at her with his brows drawn-up in a look that was as pitying as it was suggestive of her question’s stupidity. Of course they’d tear it down. Not a Saiyan resided in the neighborhood anymore, making their churches superfluous. Even if the plot wasn’t repurposed into profitable condos, the Icejin bourgeoisie would find more use for it as an empty lot for their dogs to piss on. Bulma balled-up the paper and tossed it pettishly into the lawn. 

“Didn’t mean to bum you out. I just thought you might want to see it before the deed was done,” he said.

Coming from someone as self-absorbed as him, the gesture was rather touching. Bulma offered some semblance of a smile despite her soured mood, but he wasn’t looking at her any longer. His attention drifted past her shoulder, and she watched his eyes roll as he grumbled, “Guess that’s our cue.” 

At the end of the block, not a hundred feet from where she and Tarble stood, a pair of soldiers conversed with some natty resident whose pointed finger that was extended in their direction spoke of her concern. 

“Why? We’re not trespassing on their precious park. This is ours. My parents were married here.”

“I know that, Dorothy. That’s why I brought you home. Now do you see what you’re up against?”

Bulma eyed the soldiers striding toward them. It wasn’t just the park, they weren’t welcome in the neighborhood at all, not without playing twenty questions with the FF. While the indignant, lippy side of her was willing to do just that given that they’d done nothing wrong, talking to the FF was like trying to reason with a brain-damaged rottweiler that only knew how to bark and bite and sniff crotches. It wasn’t worth the trouble on the Westside where Saiyans outnumbered their foreign landlords, much less in a district the Icejin had annexed for themselves. That Tarble, of all people, didn’t hide his anxiety as the soldiers marched toward them, taking her hand to drag her back toward the bike at a fast clip was unnerving. 

“You’re really afraid of them? Thought you picked your teeth with soldier bones.”

“Twice a day as prescribed.”

“So why are we running, Eddie? Did you forget to bring a gift?”

Tarble tisked over his shoulder and let go of her hand. He strode toward his bike, forcing her to jog and keep up. When he leapt over the saddle and kicked it into gear, threatening to peel away without her while the soldiers picked up their pace to run, closing in, Bulma acquiesced. “Okay! Fuck dude. Come on, I was kidding. You aren't really gonna leave me here!”

“Thought you weren’t scared of them.”

“I am!” she cried and launched to grab the bike’s seat. “You’ve proved your fucking point. Let me on.”

His grin fell away as he idled long enough for Bulma to mount the bike and secure her arms around his waist before he tore away from the curb. 

Bulma hadn’t quite shaken off the bitterness of learning what her parents’ old neighborhood had become when he inquired what she’d like to do next. The answer was nothing, or better yet, sulk. But the way he seemed to assume there was another leg of their tour, she’d feel worse asking him to bring her straight home. 

“I’m kinda hungry. There a place we can eat without getting arrested?” 

With a nod, Tarble slipped into the turn lane then headed north along the avenue. The drive was easy with him at the helm—far more familiar with the city proper, he had the patience to maneuver the bike through the painstaking crawl of block-by-block traffic. After a while, with her head laid against his back, observing the transformation of the people and shops and the autumn sky that was already turning to dusk all at once, she felt relieved, almost rejuvenated to arrive in the grimy outskirts of his district that felt as welcoming as her own. 

The old cobblestone streets were narrower and more populated than the Western District's, and there was an international flavor passed in multilingual conversations and store signage and music streaming from tall, tenement stacks. 

Bulma practically skipped beside him as they approached a long, lively pedestrian boulevard, illuminated by cords of lights that were draped between stalls of vendors. An undercurrent of live music at the opposite end played beneath the crowd’s burbling chatter, and the air was saturated with the rich scents of cooking food. If she’d been to the International Market Square before, she was too young to remember it. She felt like a tourist, wide-eyed, grinning dopily as her head darted around taking everything in. 

She nearly forgot Tarble was with her until his arm fell across her shoulders and his voice rumbled against her ear. “What do you want?”

“You’re the veteran,” she shouted back. 

Every stall looked uniquely inviting with sizzling street fare from around the globe. Tarble directed them to one with a half circle bar. Its top was decorated in a colorful tile mosaic, and white birdcage lanterns dangled above their heads. Too busy watching a cook at the back stuff pastries from a large, ceramic bowl of meat before he dropped them into a fryer, she didn’t notice Tarble had ordered until he nudged her and held out a glass. 

Bulma took a whiff this time before testing a tentative sip. “Smoked tequila?” 

“Not quite. Same family.”

The reply was insufficient, clipped in a way that seemed abstracted from her company. Sometime en route to the market, his high-metered attention had dropped to a low register; though considering his earlier mention of staying out all night, she suspected his energy tank was just depleted. With drinks and a meal, he’d either refuel or crash and burn.

“So… what’s your bar like?” Bulma asked, a little at a loss for talk.

“Not my bar, and it’s a shithole. Part-time venue with metal bands. Mostly cheap beer and cheaper whiskey.” 

“You play?”

“Hell no,” he said, his focus rallied through a bit of contention as she struck a nerve. “It’s torture enough just having to listen to it.”

“Ah, so music over politics was a lie? Why am I not surprised.”

“Tch. There’s a difference between good punk and shit metal. Believe me, you’d wanna rip your ears off if you had to listen to the garbage that venue bills as music night after night.”

“Maybe you should start your own bar then, a fancy one with fancy drinks.”

“I don’t do cocktails.”

“Not a fan of wine corks either, if I remember. Really pigeonholing yourself there, bud. You could always move to America and become the next Clint Eastwood. Nothing but hip flasks and horses.” 

Tarble’s nose wrinkled from inside the cup at the ridiculous suggestion, but lacking the verve to issue a quippy retort, the dialogue fell away. Considering this whole outing was a product of his scheming and for his benefit, the empathy she felt for him was undeserved. But she knew a thing or two about the way the night could collapse on a person, how difficult it could be to catch a breath under the weight of it, how sleep, even if it were possible, could feel so lonely that it was more comforting to avoid the healthy, active pursuit of it, and instead bring it about through a kind of self-destruction.

After a silence where his gaze seemed to go straight through her, Bulma made another attempt to pick-up the conversational straw with a more provoking topic and asked, “Seriously, what’s the dream? You wake up tomorrow and you can be anything, what would you do?”

“Second date conversation?” he ventured, arching a brow.

“Really more of an abduction than a date, isn’t it?”

At that, he managed a haughty smile, but making no attempt to answer the question, Bulma volunteered hers first.

“My dad was a doctor. Not a real one. He couldn’t afford school, but he joined the Royal Army as a field medic.”

Tarble’s interest suddenly perked to interrupt, “Your dad was in the Royal Army?”

“Barely. He was shot in the hip on his first tour and discharged. But he trained through them. Turns out a limp isn’t a terrible price to pay for a free education. After that, he did what he could in that role for our community, serving people that couldn’t afford a legitimate doctor. I’d do something like that. Not in healthcare, and nothing so personal either. Believe it or not, I’m not really a people-person, so something high-level on the policy side.”

The bartender slid two cardboard boats of food before them, each filled with rice and beans and a fried pastry. Bulma followed Tarble’s lead, cutting the thing in half to let the steam escape before attempting a bite of its shredded meat stuffing. 

“Your turn,” she prompted. 

As if to circumvent an answer, he heaped a forkful of food into his mouth with none of the pretentious etiquette he’d displayed previously toward the noble art of ingestion. She wasn’t about to let him use food as a distraction to avoid her query, which wasn’t without purpose. While it was obvious why Tarble was reluctant to talk about his present the first night, or his past the second, his reticence in discussing his future was less straightforward. In her experience, motivation was a fair metric to gauge a person’s character. They had a choice in the matter. 

“Come on, there’s gotta be something you want.”

He picked up his drink with a dramatic swirl and threw it back, a gesture that suggested he wouldn’t change a thing.

“Liar. You wouldn’t be in–” Bulma stopped herself from mentioning the Resistance out loud. “Your extracurricular… You wouldn’t be doing it without some kind of vision for the future.”

“That’s more of a retrospective endeavor.”

It took a second to work out what he meant. “Revenge? That’s it? That’s your sole motivation?”

“Not up to your standard, I take it?” 

“No, it’s…” Bulma wanted to say petty, misguided at best, but thought better of spraying him with adjectives that were likely to come off with the sanctimonious tenor of someone who could never understand what it was like to lose their family, their home, and their entire identity in a single ambush, then be forced to live under the power of the responsible party. 

She wasn’t ignorant to feelings of injustice. While his power was forcibly taken away, she never had any to begin with, but it made all the difference. Starting at zero meant she could be pragmatic, big-picture, future-thinking, where someone whose privilege was stolen limited their focus to playing catch-up. And the outcome, if they achieved it, was never quite equivalent to what they had before. They always felt the need to anti-up to a new extreme.

Careful to draw her voice in, Bulma huddled close. “Revenge can’t give you closure. It’ll only make you a cog in the machine. It’s–”

“The machine?” he interupped, his lip curling in the caustic, mocking way of a playground bully preempting his defense, trying to make her feel stupid to avoid the risk of her expressing a point that might make him feel wrong. 

“It goes like this: a child’s family is murdered without consequence, so he grows up fixated on revenge. His whole life is consumed with the singular goal of seeing the responsible party, his villain, succumb to a similar fate, preferably a worse fate to account for the following years they enjoyed scot free while he suffered alone. And revenge, like fear, is one hell of a motivator, so he’ll stop at nothing, exhaust all of his potential, risk his own life if he has to just to get it. 

“Eventually, he does. He kills everyone associated with his villain, everyone that stands in his path who are aiding and protecting them until finally he gets to the source. He's sacrificed himself and all the good he might have done for this one moment: to look his villain in the eye and put them down for good. That’s the end, he thinks. If he’s lucky, he can finally move on and live his life, and if he’s not, he’s just as miserable as he’s always been, realizing that without his villain, he doesn't have one. But hey, at least justice was served. He doesn’t ever have to think about that vile piece of shit roaming the earth. 

“Meanwhile, from all the lives he took in his quest for vengeance are their children. He becomes their villain. They grow up just like he did, miserable and alone, consumed by the same vendetta, fresh cogs in an old machine that keep the wheels of war steamrolling ahead, one generation after the next.”

Tarble’s attention, rapt and pulsing at his temples while she spoke, abruptly broke away toward the bartender who was busy at the opposite end. He tipped an irritated glance at his empty glass before he flung it to slide across the lacquered tiles like an air hockey puck. When it stopped less than an inch from the edge, he cocked his head toward her, looking rather smug to see her relief that it hadn’t tipped and shattered. 

“So the moral of your little story is to suck it up and bend over?” he chided.

“No, of course not. I’m just saying that revenge, the kind you think you want, is more problematic than it is a panacea. You have no plan for what comes next. You’re setting this up to be some pinnacle moment, which means right now in the accent you’re as happy as you’ll ever be, and afterward, the second you start to climb down, you’ll be worse off. Justice is important, but by itself, it’s far too narrow of goal. And if we’re talking bigger picture, resorting to the same brutal tactics makes you a villain too, not a hero. There are other methods.”

The smile he extended toward her was so cruelly maligned, the abstracted knowledge that he was a killer felt tangible. She imagined it was akin to the expression his victims met, looking up at him as they begged for mercy on behalf of their kids. 

“Tell me, princess,” he said, “how are those methods working out for you?”

Bulma had no interest in being baited to argue a topic he wasn’t willing to consider fairly. He didn’t want to debate. He was a cranky toddler who wanted to indulge his miserable, overtired mood and make her miserable too. He took her questioning his motivations personally, as if she was attacking his character. 

After he’d made a gallant effort to earn her trust back, not that he had completely, she was a little surprised that he’d so easily let his stubbornness sabotage his gains. Mask off, maybe this was who he really was—bitter and merciless. There was more to him than that, she knew, but he was unwilling to prove it, and it wasn’t her job to drag it out of him. He fucked up when he lied to her. Atoning for the lie was his prerogative. 

Bulma’s lips pressed together, losing her appetite for food as much as second chances. Without finishing her drink, she climbed off the stool to segue out of their so-called date. “It’s getting late. I should catch the train and try to get some sleep for once.”

Tarble pretended not to hear her and continued to stare impatiently at the bartender who’d yet to make his way over.

“Thanks for the tour. I guess, um… Maybe we’ll do it again sometime… You know where I am.”

At that, his spiteful gaze shot toward her, followed by a hollow hiss of laughter that slid from his teeth and revealed the cold, sneering truth: “If you’re going to lie, maybe practice in the mirror before you try it out on a professional.”

***

Bulma slouched sullenly at the kitchen table with a glass of whiskey and a notepad, only managing progress with one of them. Beyond a few loose bullets, she had nothing for her rally speech, assuming Kami’s team would even let her deliver one. Ceding them control of the event could very well mean disassociating it with the Capsule brand entirely, now that the group had been ludicrously accused of bombing their own march. 

Her attempt to catch up on sleep was just as dismal as her attempt to write. Both failures stemmed from distracted thoughts that were hopelessly snagged on Tarble, trying to work out what he meant by his remark. All his earlier insistence that he wasn’t anything more than a soldier, that he had no ill intentions, that the couple of nights they’d spent together were organic and outside of any scheme, even if he was telling the truth, she was finding difficulty in understanding why she cared. If he’d wanted to con her trust on behalf of the people he worked for, his skin was too thin for the job. The speed in which his demeanor eroded was a goddamn mudslide, like he just gave up. She doubted he was a fervent believer, fighting for the Ghost Prince to restore Prince Vegeta's reign, as much as he was an opportunist who sought any excuse to avenge his family's murder with more of the same. He wasn't a cold-blooded killer. He was a hot-headed vigilante. The truth didn’t change the complicated nature of their relationship. The Capsule Corps were upended already thanks to the Resistance. She couldn’t date one of their foot soldiers. If anyone figured out what he was, she’d lose all credibility. 

Sick of listening to her own pencil tapping against the pad of paper, Bulma wandered over to the dresser and flicked on the radio, startling the cat from where he’d been sleeping on the opposite chair at the table. It wasn’t until Scratch’s ears flicked backward toward the fire escape and his head snapped around that she realized the music wasn’t what woke him. 

Bulma’s hands jumped to her mouth to cover a scream. Even in the dark with his hoodie pulled over his head like some prowler, she knew it was him. As she hurried over to hoist the window open, she was a little disturbed by how easily he’d managed to climb up. Either he was nimble as ninja or the platform wasn't a one-directional escape, but an either-or situation, and she should start locking the pane.

“What the hell, Tarble? I have a buzzer!” she scolded but still stepped aside to let the fool in. 

He didn’t so much climb through as fumble clumsily over the sill, which for someone with his alcohol tolerance was a little worrisome. For the sake of the public, she hoped he’d done his drinking on the Westside and didn’t drive all the way from Uptown in this condition. 

“Good god, how wasted are you?” Bulma asked, wrapping an arm around his waist to help him rescue his footing. He’d drunk himself into such a state that he wouldn’t likely remember any of this in the morning beyond the unfortunate embarrassment that always accompanied the realization of having functioned out in the world without one's own consent. 

Suddenly, he seemed to remember why he was there, pawing his hoodie from his head as he narrowed his sloppy gaze on her and slurred with a jab of his finger against her chest, “I’m not a villain.” 

Ah, so she was the culprit of his spoiled his mood. She hadn’t meant to insinuate that he was evil, just that his actions, depending on who was on the receiving end of them, could rightly be interpreted as such. Villainy was less inherent as it was mutable, in the eye of the beholder so to speak.

He twisted from her support with a huff, staggering a few steps until he caught himself against the wall and pressed his back against it. 

“I’m not the villain” he repeated, but the way his gaze hovered without focus and his voice fell away, weak as an echo, suggested he was trying to convince himself of the fact. He ran a palm down his face, sniffing heavily. “I just made a mistake is all,” he whispered, flat and far away as a mantra one utters on repeat until they really believe it. 

Bulma wasn’t conceited enough to think lying to her was the sole cause for the kind of disturbance that rocked him. Nor did she think her monologue on the ethics of warfare was capable of shaking his conscience. Even if the soldiers he killed a few nights ago had invoked the names of their children as he turned their own guns on their heads, she had no doubt his perfectly white teeth barred in a sadistic smile was the last thing they saw before he pulled the trigger.

Hesitantly, Bulma set a palm against his cheek. “Tarble–” 

“It’s his birthday,” he mumbled. His eyes, laden with bad habits, tracked from the opposite wall to meet hers, but there was nothing behind them but drunken vacancy.

“It’s whose birthday?”

As if struck by a smack of clarity, he reset his gaze. His pupils homed on hers, and the brain behind them suddenly revived. Recognizing where he was, or perhaps what he'd said, Tarble lurched, pushing past her in a bid for the front door. Bulma made a grab for him, catching the sleeve of his jacket. All her instinct jumped to prevent the maniac from meeting certain self-destruction if allowed off-leash in the streets in this condition. 

It wasn’t difficult to contain him. Drunk as he was, a light backward tug unbalanced his footing and left him groping for support. He spun and threw his arms around her shoulders. The weight of him as it sank against her threatened to take her down, forcing her feet to dance back to find a stable brace against the floor. 

In the few seconds of stillness it took to reaffirm a semblance of stability, something authentic in him escaped his mouth as a sob, technically half a sob the way he quickly swallowed, forcing a hiccup to lock it back inside his throat. 

It was hard to understand how a person could find it so easy to play a role ninety-percent of the time, become another person entirely, then spend the other ten percent of his existence trying to bury his real self alive. If Tarble had the option, he’d probably use a shovel to strike a fatal blow to whoever it was he used to be, then carry on with a puckish smile and a pocket full of arcade tokens as this other self.

While his fractured identity was obvious the night Bulma met him, at the time he seemed confident, a carefully controlled chaos that was impossible to decode. But now, knowing something both of his origin and the ill-conceived logic by which he presently sought to avenge a family he loathed when they were around, the mystery was far less convoluted than it appeared on the surface. He felt guilty—a heaping plate of survivor’s guilt served with a side of regret for the way he felt about them. Joining the Shadow Army had less to do with bloodthirsty vengeance than absolving his conscience. In a way, she found that motivation easier to accept. 

He didn’t cry again, but he stayed there, arms hugged around her with his chin on her shoulder. Anyone as agile and brazen enough as him to climb her fire escape to look inside would think theirs was the world’s most awkward slow dance the way she hugged him back, their feet barely lifting as they swayed along to the radio. Bulma smothered a smile against his neck as The Clash’s ‘ _'I fought the Law_ ' cover made an ill-timed appearance over the airwaves.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!! Hope you don't mind another sad boy Vegeta. Maybe someday, I'll figure out how to write him NOT emo. :P


	9. Too Drunk to F**k

Vegeta dozed through the morning, drifting in and out of dreams he couldn’t remember passed their dreadful, lingering mood. When he finally woke, confused to find a cat’s coarse tongue stroking him between the eyes, his stomach plunged with a sudden horror, recognizing where he was but not how he’d arrived. He shot upright, t-shirt damp with sweat, clinging to his back. Desperately, he tried to walk his mind through the night’s shit-show of events that now left him alone in Bulma’s apartment.

It was his own fault, really. He'd ignored his instinct to celebrate Tarble’s birthday in the tradition he was used to—alone, aimlessly meandering the city in a drunken stupor, forcing himself to replay every interaction that ever occurred between them in the kid’s short life as some kind of punishment. Instead this year, he selfishly sought to reconcile his relationship with Bulma Briefs and convinced himself that it was solely for the good of the cause. 

After her prickly departure from the market, he stayed, bar-hopping up the boulevard for far too long, over-saturating indignation with every drink. The self-righteous serving of judgement Bulma delivered, while he expected to contend with it eventually, he didn’t anticipate the walls of his stiff discipline to crumble like a goddamn sandcastle. The ease with which she’d gotten under his skin was frightening mostly for the fact that it suggested he actually cared about her opinion.

Later he’d made his way across the river to the arcade for a distraction. Despite not being busy, the inane racket of a group of players at a nearby console managed to enrage him further. But still coherent enough to sense the tenuous grip on his temper slipping, he wisely fled to a dive across the street. That’s where the night finally receded into a hazy memory and disappeared. 

He remembered the atmosphere of the place being gloomier than his mood, with dim, yellow lighting and a blanket of smoke hanging stagnant in the air. Its few patrons were expectantly ripe. Old men hunched over the bar with frowns worn permanently into their heavily lined faces. It wasn’t the kind of establishment one went to socialize, but to ruminate on a lifetime of disappointments that brought them there. Its bartender was of a similar disposition; sparing pointless conversational filler, he mutely kept their glasses full until their memories were gone. 

Vegeta couldn’t recall how long he stayed, whether or not he settled his bill, or how afterward, his unmanned mind navigated the rest of him to Bulma’s apartment. Even more terrifying was imagining what the hell he could have said to her that she’d allow him inside to sleep in her bed. 

It required some wincing effort to grope his way off the mattress and drag his heavy limbs into the kitchen. A note was left for him on the table, weighted by a key. He had to close an eye to read: _T - Working through lunch, but stay as long as you want. Help yourself to anything in the cupboards (bread is moldy, sry). Plz drink water! Lock up if you leave. - B_

_Tch._ It was going to take something stronger than water to rinse the taste of death from his mouth and dull the pick-axe headache that felt like the backs of his eyes were being chiseled from their sockets. It didn’t help matters when the door downstairs buzzed in two successive zaps. Maybe that’s why he hated visitors: classical conditioning thanks to whatever imbecile designed the sound that heralded them. It was the auditory equivalent of electrocution. 

Vegeta didn’t bother with the door and rifled through Bulma’s stash of booze under the sink that was commendable in variety only. Each brand had a reputation worse than turpentine. He opted for a bottle of peppermint schnapps despite that its peeling, yellowed label suggested she purchased it the day she turned eighteen. Vegeta was fairly certain alcohol didn’t expire, not like the petri loaf of bread she left to grow heads inside her cupboard. 

He discarded his acrid t-shirt, doused his face in cold water, then lied back in bed to sip a beverage worse than mouthwash. With his eyes closed and the purring cat stretched out between his calves, he almost felt like half a person… Until the damnable buzzer went off again. Twice wasn’t enough this time for whatever scourge was downstairs with a death wish. If he had a pistol on him, he would at least threaten to use it on the angsty fucker that was ceaselessly pummeling what remained of his nerves into a raging pulp.

Negotiating the stairs with as much bravado and barb as possible in his condition, Vegeta stomped barefooted toward the building’s entryway and threw open the door. But instead of a waiting visitor, something fell from the frame and hit the top of his foot: a single bill folded into the shape of an arrow, which meant it was urgent from one of their own. He poked his head around the doorframe as he plucked the note from the floor and caught a glimpse of Cabba disappearing around the corner. 

Nappa’s handwriting was easy to recognize, but the message he’d coded along the border beckoning him back to the bar was without any context. If there was an emergency, the man would have signaled as much. Vegeta’s brows pinned to force a level of critical thinking his brain wasn’t currently happy to handle. Then, the reason dawned on him. He’d slept through the distribution meeting he promised he wouldn’t miss, and now daddy was pissed, crying wolf through origami. Station and rank meant little when it came to dealing with Nappa once he’d worked his thick neck into a froth. 

As far as truly urgent matters were concerned, Nappa could wait. It was Bulma with whom Vegeta was most worried. He had to know what precious confession he might have given the woman to turn her vitriol into sympathy overnight.

He wouldn’t have to wait long, it seemed. His brother’s name piped cheerily from feet away. 

“Someone rang the door, but they left,” Vegeta said, hastening to explain why he was downstairs wearing nothing but a pair of jeans; though Bulma didn’t appear to hear him. Her gaze roamed down his front in some unconscious appraisal. It gave him a jolt of pleasure to distract the woman without trying. Vegeta cocked a hip against the door frame and grinned, “Woman, don’t be vulgar. My face is up here.” 

“ _Tch._ Cool hair,” Bulma scoffed at the wild case of bedhead he undoubtedly sported, then charged passed him, taking the first few steps at a stomp—some humorous little tantrum to absorb her embarrassment. 

While a hangover could gutter Vegeta’s motivation for even the simplest tasks and make a three-story stairwell feel like a herculean ascent to the summit of Mt. Olympus, sex was one activity for which it had an inverse effect. The view of her ass, perfectly hugged by a pair of flared denim jeans, made the climb almost painless. 

“Thought this might help.” Bulma pulled a bottle of Coca-Cola from the tote she’d dropped on the kitchen table and popped the cap against its edge. She sat down on the bed where he was already sprawled across the sheets and extended the soda. The devious smile she wore said he was about to be served his own dose of shame. “So… Seems we’re even when it comes to drinking ourselves into a sorry, sobbing regression.”

“What?” It took his sluggish brain a second to work out the implication. “You’re dreaming, woman. I don’t cry.” 

“Okay, tough guy,” she said, rolling her eyes in sync with the bottle she wagged above his face. “I suppose that means I dreamed up having to help you untie your shoes while you whimpered like a baby before I tucked you into bed, and–”

“I remember none of this. It never happened,” Vegeta interjected, as if a one-sided denial might work on them both. 

What she described wasn’t outside the realm of possibility. In fact, it was exactly the kind of sentimental thorn his mood snagged on twice a year for the past ten years and the reason he spent those days alone. Regret wasn’t an emotion he was equipped to deal with, and the sad state it could reduce him to was an unflattering image he wasn’t keen to project. Embarrassing at it was to hear that he had, at least from the sounds of it, Vegeta still managed to maintain enough of his wits to keep his mouth shut as to why. If he'd let it slip, she wouldn’t be acting so cheeky. 

While he loathed to imagine his drunken antics, crying like a toddler, he was relieved Bulma found them hilarious enough to forget the more caustic ones he displayed at the market. 

She leaned over him as she continued to tease, “I had to bottle feed you water because you’re such a pouty little bitch, and then give you a pillow to hug when Scratch refused to be your security blanket.”

“Now you’re just making shit up because I said I don’t remember.”

“Did I make up your apologies too?” Her voice dropped in a whiney, mocking imitation: “I’m sorry, Bulma. I swear I’m not a bad person. I just want you to like me.”

Oh good god, she definitely wasn’t lying. It’s what set him off, her assertion that pursuing Frieza was unlikely to absolve him of his own misery and instead would only make him an accomplice to more. Even after he whitewashed his memory, his primitive brain continued to ruminate over the judgement with drink after drink at bar after bar. 

“Your drunk alter ego is such a sad, needy boy. What should we call him? Warble?”

The noise that left Vegeta’s throat sounded more like a puppyish whimper than the growl he imagined. He grabbed a pillow to crush the sudden discomfiture that bloomed across his face. She was the most ridiculous person, working herself into a fit of taunts and sniggers as she fell atop him and tried to pry it away. More than a cure for a hangover, the hum and vibration of her giggling was an antidote for self-loathing, especially once the tricky bitch let go of the pillow to wriggle her fingers against his neck. 

“Aww, Warble! What’s the matter, bud? You cryin’ under there?” 

“No!” he refuted, though the muffled lightness in his voice belied the gravity he’d intended. Desperately, he tried to ward off her contagion, raising his shoulders as he squirmed and smiled beneath the pillow. His grip on it purposefully loosened, disguising a forfeit as a loss, letting her take it before she could claim a real victory from his laughter. More terrifying than this girl drawing it out of him was imagining what an honest note of it sounded like uncoated by mirth. 

With the blankest expression he could manage, eyes trained on the pillow, hoping she’d have the decency to smother him with it if he cracked a smile, Vegeta asked, “Did it work, all the winging and warbling?” 

“Not gonna lie; it was kind of adorable.” Bulma propped it on his chest to cushion her chin. Her bright eyes fixed on him and a soft smile pulled across her lips. “So what now?” she wondered. The question was far less ambiguous than she assumed he’d understand, leaving her quick to clarify, “I just mean… I’m accepting your apology. I don’t think you’re a bad man, and I do like you. Whatever this is, I’m okay with it so long as you’re fucking honest with me. No more secrets or omissions or lies.”

Vegeta could think of nothing to say. Her admission that she wanted to keep seeing him despite himself, shocked as he was to hear it, the thrill was instantly offset by her demand which touched a nerve of guilt. Even if this so-called relationship had been pursued with a kind of sincerity that would have Nappa staging a coupe—meeting her conditions wasn’t possible. She had to know that. 

“Seriously?” Bulma hissed when he failed to respond. All the delicacy in her expression twisted to wrath as she pushed off him. While Vegeta understood his hesitation didn’t inspire confidence, she wasn’t considering the complex nature of her request. 

“Calm down, Bulma. You know I can’t just tell you everything, not unless you’d like to join our ranks.”

“I’m not asking you for fucking trade secrets! I just–” she interrupted herself with a sudden skip to another thought. “Do any of your people know about us?”

“Not likely,” he lied. 

Bulma nodded, staring entranced at a point over his head. The chaotic landscape of her mind frantically combed through all the possible complications. 

“Good. Let's keep it that way,” she said. Her gaze floated back to meet his, and with no less severity, she added, “I swear to god, Tarble. Don’t use me for their agenda.”

“I wasn’t. I won’t!” 

“Good, ‘cause I might not be so immune to personal vendettas as I’d like to project, and it would be a little too poetic for you to be the one to make me a hypocrite.” 

She kept her pretty blue eyes unrelentingly pinned to his as her fingers traced down the line of his abdomen to unbutton his jeans. Whatever minor threat she’d laced into her words intentionally diverted his blood. He felt it warm between his legs. The pressure tightened as she yanked down his waistband to expose him. 

Light at first, she bent to tease her lips over the tip of his cock. Her gaze remained darkly fixated on his own as her tongue moved against her teeth, working up enough spit before she set her mouth at the base and trailed up the shaft in a long, wet lick. The little grin that formed at the corners of her lips as she reached the head held something equally as provocative as terrifying. 

Bulma Briefs was a poser, the same as she accused him. She admitted it openly, twice. Not a people-person, she said, knowing full-well she could lead the entire Westside’s populace into battle with a word. And just now, with a not-so-subtle threat, she was taunting her ability to exploit him, smiling with satisfaction as she watched him bite his bottom lip. She was less a pacifist than she was a lazy viper hiding in the brush, letting a threat trample into her habitat, waiting until that threat cut it down with a machete before she’d finally strike. 

Her eyes drifted shut as she took him deep into her throat, moaning lightly as she sucked. Her thumb and forefinger circled around him to stroke up and down beneath her lips. 

A hangover was difficult enough to keep from exploding on impact, let alone with this girl. Nappa was right, he knew Vegeta better than he knew himself. He’d been obsessed with Bulma Briefs for more than five years. Nappa was just wrong in assuming he hated her. He did on principle, at first, because she had them. She wasn’t Eighteen who seemed to get off on competition, mistaking Vegeta for a stepping stone to power. Proximity was half the reason Eighteen pursued him, believing he was the least incompetent, yet more sensitive of Nappa’s nephews, and damaged enough to usurp. Her calculation was sound, however, sleeping with him wasn’t required to prove it. Nappa already trusted her more than he did Vegeta and Raditz combined because she didn’t come with their baggage. Eighteen was cold and unfeeling as a cyborg. She wasn’t fighting to redeem her father. She disliked the man the same as Vegeta disliked his own. But had her sibling been lost the way Vegeta abandoned Tarble or the way Raditz, until now, assumed Kakarot was gone, she wouldn’t lose sleep over him or drink herself to death. She wouldn’t fucking blink.

Vegeta was the weak point. As much as he pretended to be hard like a dartboard, he was soft like a pincushion. Maybe softer than Raditz, because unlike that fool who, assuming the worst, never went home for Kakarot, Vegeta made a conscious decision to throw Tarble to the wolves. Nappa aided and abetted that decision. And now, at best, Vegeta was less the prince Nappa and their entire army wanted him to be than he was a rueful alcoholic with a vendetta. He wasn’t a leader people believed in, not like the girl who was currently deepthroating him as if the same logic of sucking poison from snakebites applied to a murder’s dick. 

Vegeta nabbed the pillow again to hold over his face and warned her. “Fuck! Stop! Bulma, you win.” 

The girl’s eyes narrowed as she pulled her lips over the sensitive tip on repeat. This wasn’t Dragon Ball. She knew she’d won the second she ogled him in the doorway. She wan’t stupid. This was payback for pretending he didn’t recognize her at the arcade. Bulma Briefs was getting off on making him get off in a manner that was one-hundred percent in her control. Watching him lose his grip as he came, shuddering between her lips felt like a booby trap. The bedsheets she used to wipe her mouth revealed a wicked smile.

Oh, if Hell existed, he’d be there to burn, because the only way this union wouldn’t implode was if she flipped by her own volition, or thought as much before Inauguration Day, before she learned who he really was. 

“Get up,” she said with a slap against his stomach that made him cough. “You look like we could use a shower.”

Eager and obedient as a labrador, Vegeta followed the girl into the hall.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh Vegeta, you are a dog.
> 
> Big thank you for the nominations for this fic in the TPTH Annual Awards! I can't thank y'all enough for the support :)


End file.
